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Pineapple Express and Alaskan cold bring snow to Whistler

Jim ‘Dr. Weather’ Roemer predicts a great season for the Pacific Northwest
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Fresh Tracks A skier enjoys 34 centimetres of powder on January 6, as storm front dumps 130 cm in the past week. Photo by Randy Links, Whistler Blackcomb.

Jim Roemer is not actually a doctor, but he has saved many a ski vacation over the years through his website, www.bestskiweather.com.

Nicknamed “Dr. Weather” by his friends in the industry, Roemer’s real job is to provide long-range weather forecasts for investment funds that need to know their money is safe in various crops and resources. Working from his home in Vermont, he also provides his services to several ski operators who need to know what trends are at work when planning for the winter season.

But at heart he’s a ski bum, helping other ski bums to plan vacations and chase powder around North America.

“I can tell them where to go weeks in advance by looking at the data, and giving them the right info,” he said, addressing a small but very interested group at Millennium Place last Friday that led off Gore-Tex Deep Winter Experience.

“That said, weather is still completely unpredictable. I think weatherman is the only job in the world where you can be wrong 90 per cent of the time and still keep your job. It’s very complicated. They have supercomputers where they can plug in every bit of data they have for a hundred years, and hundreds of variables, and that can still be wrong.

“It literally comes down to chaos theory, where if a bird flaps its wings around the world it can set off a chain reaction that makes it rain.”

Roemer is right more often than 10 per cent of the time (hence the nickname), and bases his weather predictions on a wide range of data that he has decided is important for snowfall — historical data, global trends like La Nina and El Nino, high and low pressure systems, wind speeds, wind direction, the flow of the jet stream, water and air temperatures in the Gulf of Alaska, the direction of winds, rain in Indonesia, moisture in the air northeast of Hawaii, global warming, and other factors.

Making things more complicated, Roemer also collects historical data that lets him see how these factors have affected snowfall in the past. When weather cycles are similar, then similar weather can be the outcome.

For example, 2007 and 1999 were record years for Whistler. Both happened when the coast was visited by a Pineapple Express from Hawaii, bringing moist air from the Pacific Ocean to the Pacific Northwest, where it was cooled by a cold front hanging over the Gulf of Alaska. La Nina — a weather phenomenon that sometimes means big snow years for Whistler — is also in full effect.

While we still get snow in El Nino years — the opposite of La Nina — Roemer says that the trend is for a few large snowfalls, rather than the constant snow we’re seeing this season.

In the atmosphere, a variety of data are compressed into two other relevant measurements. One is called the Eastern Pacific Oscillation Index, or EPO, which is responsible for the cold lows hanging out in the Gulf of Alaska. The other is the Pacific-North America Oscillation Index, which is basically the opposite — a high pressure system pushing the Alaskan low further north and east.

“The best possible world is when we have a positive EPO and a negative PNA,” said Roemer. “In years like 04-05, which was Whistler’s worst snow year ever, the PNA was positive and really strong and it just killed us. All that moisture that traveled to the coast from the Pineapple Express fell as rain.

“Of course the process reversed itself in the spring, and March was pretty good that year, but it makes for a short season.”

Roemer predicted that Whistler would have an excellent season this winter, and showed a satellite image of five storms lined up to sweep across the Pacific Northwest.

Some of those storms dipped as low as Northern California, bringing more than three metres of snow to some ski areas, while also pounding Utah. While temperatures are generally warmer in those states, the fact that their resorts are at a higher altitude has allowed most of the precipitation to fall as snow.

“What we’re seeing could be an analogue of the 1999 pattern, with one exception and that is that it wasn’t a La Nina year,” said Roemer.

That said, if any factors change — the Alaska Gulf warms or the low pressure trough moves north, or the PNA index becomes positive and the EPO negative, then temperatures could warm enough to cause snow to fall as rain.

Also, if the jet stream that keeps the storms moving through the Pacific Northwest is stalled by collisions with other patterns, the snow could dry up for as long as those conditions last.

“Right now I don’t think that’s going to happen,” said Roemer. “Through December and January, anyway, although things could change in February or March when things start to warm up.”

Roemer went a little further out on a limb by suggesting that we’re entering a pattern where cool temperatures in Alaska could persist for the next five to 10 years. That means five to 10 years of good winters for Whistler, he said.

One factor Roemer also takes into consideration is global warming, which he believes is happening as a result of rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. While it will have negative impacts around the globe in terms of changing weather patterns, such as droughts and floods, he also subscribes to the theory that climate change will result in the coast becoming wetter and colder.

“It could actually be better for Whistler in the short-term, bringing more storms to the coast, but it will probably be worse in the long run if all the precipitation starts to fall as rain,” he said. “Maybe in 200 years it’s going to suck. And maybe a lot sooner than that.”

For the most part Roemer offers his advice for free on his website, although he has about 1,000 subscribers that help keep the site running. He offers links to various weather services, as well as his own analysis of the larger trends that are shaping the weather for various regions. He offers Podcasts, for people that want to listen to his regular reports, and for resorts and tour operators looking to visually profile weather and snow depth there is a service called SkiGoggs.

A lot of people ask Roemer to predict the weather for the 2010 Olympics. While Roemer believes the current weather cycle could hold for the next five years, there are no guarantees.

“We’ll have to see if it’s a La Nina or El Nino year, and the temperatures in the Gulf of Alaska, but it’s hard to predict. We make guesses by looking at data and the probability of weather cycles, because history can sometimes repeat itself, but there are too many factors. I’m pretty confident making forecasts for the next few weeks, but two years is a little harder to predict. I’d feel better making my predictions in January 2010.”