Winter is Coming

Is another ‘Polar Vortex’ coming along with it?

Sept. 28, 2014

It wasn’t your imagination. Last winter was a doozy.

Some people loved it. Many hated it. We all managed to survive it.

2014 also left us with a lot of questions – did it signal a new trend for colder winters? Was winter 2014 a record-breaker? Where did "˜polar vortex’ originate? What happened to global warming? What should we expect this winter?

We asked the experts.

WHAT WILL WINTER 2015 BE LIKE?

Expect this winter to be cold, but not as cold as last year.

Expect snow, but not as much as last year. Winter 2014 saw extreme conditions that lasted from November into May. Expect this winter to be shorter.

"It looks like it’s not going to be as long of a winter; certainly cold, but not as cold as what we saw last year," said Jim Keysor, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gaylord. "There are some signals we’re seeing now that say we might finish warmer."

Keysor said he expects average snowfall. There is still a debate among forecasters about weather a small El Nino pattern – a warming of the Pacific that can cause a mild Midwestern winter – might take hold this winter, said Joe Charlevoix, meteorologist at TV 7&4 in Traverse City.

Charlevoix said current forecasts predict a slightly warmer November, December and January, and he expects the rest of the winter to see average temperatures.

"I don’t foresee anything kind of like what we had last year," Charlevoix said.

And the "polar vortex"? "I just don’t think we’ll see it necessarily with the same force that we saw last year," Keysor said.

WHAT DO SKI RESORTS EXPECT?

Last winter’s cold and snow was a mixed blessing for ski resorts. While the season was long and there was plenty of snow, extreme temperatures kept people home in January and February.

"Yes, it impacted us," said Ken Griffin, Michigan director of marketing at Boyne. "But we saw that business come back in March, as soon as it warmed up."

Ski resorts, especially large ones, pay close attention to weather reports and long range outlooks. During the ski season, Boyne contracts its own weather forecasts.

So what does Griffin predict this year? He expects to see some shots of cold weather but overall warmer temperatures through the season and less snow.

"We would trade a little bit less snow for slightly warmer temperatures," Griffin said.

Griffin hopes Boyne will be open by Thanksgiving again this year.

"I think it gets everybody’s anticipation and excitement up, whenever they see were going to have a really good winter," Griffin said.

DID WINTER 2014 SIGNAL A COLD WINTER TREND?

A big question for a lot of people is whether last winter was an anomaly or sign of things to come.

"You know what? The next two years will tell us," Charlevoix said. "If I had to put money on it, I would say we’re not going to see anything like that this winter. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen."

A study released in early September by the scientific journal Nature Communications linked extreme cold in the Midwest to warmer temperatures in the Arctic. A warmer Arctic means less ice mass, which in turn disrupts the jet stream, allowing Arctic air to descend into North America.

State of Michigan Climatologist Jeffrey Andresen said he believes evidence shows it’s more likely the region will become warmer rather than cooler, however.

"It’s certainly something that needs to be looked at in detail, because some of the evidence does support that," Andresen said of the Nature study. "I have seen evidence both supporting that and some that’s not supportive."

Keysor doesn’t buy into projections that the winter of 2014 established a trend that will mean colder, snowier winters for the foreseeable future.

"I think it’s something we’re going to have to watch over time," he said. "We have such limited data that we can look at really, when we’re talking about Arctic ice. Satellite data goes back to 1979."

WHAT ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING?

In the past 35 years, Michigan has gotten two degrees warmer, on average, Andresen said.

That’s one reason he believes last winter was a fluke.

"I think given everything we know about how climate works, I think we have to view it as something abnormal – climate scientists would refer to it as a singularity," said Andresen, who also teaches climatology at MSU.

Andresen said it is incredibly unlikely – though not impossible – we will see another winter like the one of 2014.

"There’s no question, even with last year, the long-term trend in the Great Lakes is for milder winters," he said.

Andresen said the continued warming would cause increasing problems – more severe weather and the introduction of new diseases – for the state’s population.

"At some point, if the magnitude of change is large enough, the impacts will be big enough to necessitate drastic changes," Andresen said.

WHERE DOES 2014 STAND IN THE PANTHEON OF WINTERS?

It’s been a long time since Michigan was as cold as it was last year.

It was the fourth coldest winter on record, and most of the top five winters took place in the 1800s, Andresen said. The last time Michiganders experienced a colder winter, the year was 1912.

Last year saw one of the longest ski seasons ever, Griffin said. It was the second longest ski season ever at Boyne Mountain and Boyne Highlands. They were open by mid- November and saw skiing until April 27.

More evidence of what a whopper the 2014 winter was came Sept. 12 when the state approved up to $7.5 million in emergency funding for infrastructure repair in a dozen counties that suffered deep freeze damage. The money will pay for repairs to roads and water and sewer lines.

Three Lower Peninsula counties – Charlevoix, Cheboygan and Emmet – are eligible because they received state of emergency declarations last winter.

WHAT DID METEOROLOGISTS THINK OF LAST WINTER?

Charlevoix grew up in the western Upper Peninsula, in Norway, which doesn’t get as much snow as northern Lower Michigan, but gets Minnesota-like cold.

Last winter was tough even for him, however.

"Last winter, I will say, it was a heck of a winter, even by my standards," Charlevoix said. "It really was. Cold, and lake effect snow on top of that."

Last winter wasn’t even like an old fashioned northern Michigan from the 1970s or 1980s. It stood out, Keyser said.

"I wouldn’t even call it a throwback winter. When we look at the records, it stood out as a top-five winter for cold," Keyser said. "It was an extreme, sort of anomalous winter, in some ways. We only see a handful of those over the decades."

WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO DEAL WITH A DEEP FREEZE?

Bob Sutherland has some advice for anyone who dreads the coming winter – get outside and embrace it.

That’s what Sutherland did last Jan. 6.

The Cherry Republic owner recounted his adventure that day on his company’s blog:

"The polar vortex has hit northern Michigan today. It is three degrees today, with a brutal wind chill that brought down the temperature to -20. My cousin Andrew Moore and our digital manager, Andrew Pritchard joined me this morning in documenting the beauty of this ferocious winter storm."

Sutherland, who spent hours that day kite skiing, walking the Lake Michigan shore, wandering into the ghostly quiet woods, was ecstatic over how the winter turned out. He believes it’s important to get outside and be active during winter.

"The reason we did that blog and the reason it was received so well, it kind of set our tone at how we looked at that last winter," he said. "We just felt that "˜polar vortex’ and that whole thing was over sensationalized. It wasn’t anywhere near as uninhabitable as the way it was portrayed."

HOW COME EVERYONE STARTED SAYING "˜POLAR VORTEX’?

It was that day Sutherland ventured out – Jan. 6, 2014 – that the term "polar vortex" made its way into the national vocabulary.

Although northern Michigan had already been frigid and would be frigid for months, that was the day a massive Arctic low-pressure system descended upon the continental United States, spreading from ocean to ocean and descending deep into the south.

On Jan. 7, according to National Geographic, all 50 states experienced freezing temperatures at some point. Thus, "polar vortex" made it into many national news reports.

The appearance of a polar vortex was not unusual. What was unusual was its size and durability.

"That happens every winter, to some extent that’s just normal. But last year, it set up before Thanksgiving and it continued with only a couple of changes well into March, and that is extraordinary," Andresen said.

The ice caves on the Lake Michigan shore in Leelanau County reached maximum size the first part of February.

The 30-foot high natural sculptures attracted thousands of visitors to beaches that are normally deserted in the dead of winter.

The formations are the product of the harsh winter conditions as winds push waves and snow onto existing ice.

Sutherland said he’d watched ice formations grow along the shore in previous years, but they never reached the scale they did last winter.

He remembers other years when small caves developed that could be crawled into on hands and knees. He recalls an ice wall that formed in 1994 near Pyramid Point that must have been 25 feet tall. These were nothing like the ice caves of 2014.

The formations created beautiful, otherworldly caves large enough for people to stand inside.

"That’s amazing how high and big they were," Sutherland said.