Mild air, drought relief in forecast

DEKALB, Ill. — If you’re waiting for water, then the weather outlook headed into the first weeks of November will be good news. But if you’re ready to break out the cold weather gear, you may have to wait a while.

“At least for the first part of the winter, I don’t see any of that brutally cold air coming down into the states,” said Logan Bundy, a Ph.D. candidate at Northern Illinois University and a meteorologist with Everstream Analytics.

But while warmer-than-normal temperatures are likely to stick around, some relief is on the way for drought-affected areas of northern Illinois and the rest of the Midwest.

“Over the next two weeks, precipitation prospects do look much better than they have over the past couple of months,” Bundy said.

Trent Ford, the Illinois state climatologist, agreed.

“The outlook for the near term, for the next two weeks, it’s going to be wetter, that’s the big thing,” he said.

Both Bundy and Ford said that a more active pattern will develop over northern Illinois that is likely to produce widespread rainfall, bringing relief to areas of the state that haven’t seen substantial rain in weeks.

“Totals around the upper Midwest and northern Illinois, over the next couple of weeks, could range in the 3- to maybe 4-inch range. It’s definitely a much more active pattern ahead, starting on Halloween and going forward,” Bundy said.

That pattern will be different from previous systems that saw sudden, heavy, isolated downpours.

“This is not a convective system where we get pop-up thunderstorms and someone gets two inches of rain and someone gets nothing. This is a low-pressure system that’s going to bring widespread rain across the state of Illinois,” Ford said.

He added that longer-term models suggest that more active pattern could stick around.

That is good news for river and stream levels, especially on major waterways like the Mississippi River, as well as tributaries like the Fox River, Kishwaukee River and Rock River.

“Even the two-week outlook is still 50% to 60% chance of above-average precipitation. That is telling us that this low-pressure system that is moving through the central region is likely going to persist, so we will likely see more active precipitation,” Ford said.

“We may not see another two inches, but more active rainfall, which is good. What we need is not just one wet week, but several wet weeks to really climb out of the drought.”

Bundy said that weather models also suggest the possibility of La Niña, a weather pattern marked by cooler-than-normal, sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

The pattern typically brings drier-than-normal autumns and wetter-than-normal winters to the Midwest.

Using La Niña trends along with Midwest winter temperature trends, Bundy said winter could start off mild.

“I think this winter there is a higher probability that temperatures for northern Illinois and the broader Midwest will be on the warmer side, just like they have been over the past few winters. With a La Niña developing, that tends to favor a warmer winter for the Midwest,” he said.