Winter weather outlook cloudy for Tucson as heat keeps coming

Tucson this week continues to fail at shaking off record-breaking heat.

The record high for any Oct. 20 in Tucson is 97 degrees, which was set in 2003. It’s expected to reach 101 degrees here on Friday.

And Tucson’s hottest Oct. 21 on record is 96 degrees, set in 2016. It’s expected to be 97 degrees here on Saturday.

It seems like a good time to look ahead at what winter might bring to the Old Pueblo.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its U.S. winter outlook Thursday.

Its winter outlook for southern Arizona: uncertain.

A wetter-than-normal winter for the southern United States, while the northern half of the country can expect a warmer-than-normal season, NOAA predicts. It’ll be the first El Niño to affect southern Arizona in three years, forecasters say.

NOAA on Thursday placed “equal chances” for both temperature and precipitation in southern Arizona.

That means national forecasters were unable Thursday to pinpoint whether or not southern Arizona should expect above-, below-, or near-normal temperature and precipitation patterns from December through February. Essentially, NOAA forecasters gave more rain here than usual a 33 percent chance of happening this winter and less rain here 33 percent chance of happening.

And, the chance for a typical winter here for rain and temperature? Yup, 33 percent.

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There’s a level of uncertainty when predicting winter weather for the western United States, Jon Gottschalk, chief of NOAA’s operational prediction branch, said Thursday.

“Typically, you tend to have a wetter signal across parts of Arizona and New Mexico ... that is often what we forecast, but other indications and information we utilized (this year), we did not see that strong enough signal that we have in the past,” Gottschalk said. “Our outlook right now is pretty uncertain for those states, and that’s why they’re forecasted equal chances.”

Weather models are consistent with their own predictions, or lack thereof, said Ken Drozd, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Tucson.

“Typically, in the cases that we’ve had El Niño’s in the past, more of them have been wetter-than-normal than not,” he said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, and even more than in previous years.”

“We have a lot more global climate models available now ... While those have showed improvement over the years, (the NOAA) is getting a variety of different solutions from models (but) there’s no real consensus among any of those models, so they don’t really have anything to hang their hat on, so to speak,” Drozd said.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is a “recurring climate pattern involving changes in the temperature” of central and eastern tropical waters of the Pacific.

During an El Niño, the National Weather Service says, warming of the Pacific’s surface creates reduced rainfall over Indonesia while rainfall increases over the ocean. The typical east-to-west surface winds instead weaken, or in some instances reverse their direction altogether. This creates a wet-and-warm weather pattern which sweeps over the southern portion of the United States, giving us above-normal rainfall.

During the last El Niño to develop here in the winter of 2018-2019, Tucson International Airport — where Tucson’s official rain total is measured — received 4.62 inches of winter rain, Drozd says. The normal amount of rainfall in the period from December through February here is 2.64 inches, he said.

Drought conditions are expected to persist in southern and southeast Arizona through January, NOAA’s winter outlook said.