Snow and ice are not Memphis hallmarks.
They lack the predictability of a Beale Street Big Ass Beer. Memphis lacks the topography to thread winter sports into our tourism package.
But here we are. We can’t count on them but they have become more frequent.
Memphis woke to another winter weather event Tuesday with more ice promised Wednesday. These events followed a quick freeze late last month that broke water mains (which brought a boil water warning), cut power to thousands, and made driving a hazard. That followed at least one major winter weather event in Memphis each year for the past few years.
It’s not enough to add snow and ice as a Memphis hallmark. But it is enough for Memphians to wonder just what is going on and if weather patterns are related to climate change.
For answers, we asked Mike Johnson, senior forecaster with the National Weather Service Memphis. —Toby Sells
Memphis Flyer: Are these winter weather events normal and we just forgot? Are we in a new place? Where are these events coming from?
Mike Johnson: We selectively remember the big things. There’s always some bias to that.
But the overarching theme is that we, as an agency, have noticed that extreme weather events are becoming more likely than they were in the past.
Now, if you want to relate that to, say, the ice storm last year, or the double, heavy snow event that we had in 2021, it’s really hard to do that. These extreme events have always happened. Attributing any single one of them to any kind of climate change perspective, you just really can’t do that. You have to look at it from a 30,000-foot view, through the big lens.
MF: When you and your colleagues are sitting around the National Weather Service office, what conclusions do you come up with?
MJ: We focus on the MidSouth. We have 55 counties of responsibility here. Our forecasts at the local level don’t go out beyond seven days. So, anything within about two weeks is really what we care about and what we talk about for the most part.
We all have an atmospheric science degree or a meteorology degree, or something along those lines that all ties in.
Nobody in this office is a climate expert. They all work the [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration – NOAA] level or the headquarters level. So, some of the stuff that you’re asking are questions that we have as well because we don’t necessarily deal with the climate like that day in, day out.
So, with my background not really being a climatologist … I’m not completely comfortable with my own ideas regarding how climate change works because I just don’t know. I would love to be able to say this is getting worse and it’s going to keep happening for the next 10 years. That may very well be the case but again, I just don’t know.
MF: I’m not trying to push you in any direction on climate change at all.
MJ: We’re the weather experts. But we’re not the climate experts. They are very closely related but they are not the same.
The research does show that extreme events are more intense and they tend to be longer lasting and larger in scale than they otherwise would have been.
The one thing that jumps out at me constantly is that it seems like for the last 10 years, out West has been just one big wildfire. We’re talking about a third of a continent with this drought that just will not go away.
MF: So, for these winter events in Memphis, is it just polar air that gets pushed down here? Did something change? What’s going on here?
MJ: We’ve always gotten air cold enough to support winter storms. But maybe not to the degree of these zero-degree readings that we had last year and I think even earlier this year. We don’t always get that cold, but we always have temperatures that are subfreezing.
A lot of times when we get those temperatures coming in, that’s when all the moisture is moving off to the east because the cold front’s through the area and the timing was just off. So, we got rain and we got cold.
But some of these events set up right where the moisture is in place, the cold air comes in and undercuts it and — voilà — there’s our snow.
This is also our third year of La Niña. El Niño and La Niña are a depiction of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures. You’re thinking, what does that have to do with the price of eggs, right? Scientists have found that these drive global weather patterns.
So, it’s not always like this. If we’re in an El Niño pattern, we get these southern stream systems that move across Mexico, affect Texas and, and then swing across the Deep South.
When we get into a La Niña pattern, which is where we’ve been for the past three years, these storms tend to take a little more northerly course. If it’s just right, it may actually detour north of Memphis.
That’s what happened this summer, and that’s why we dried out and the river level became what it became. We’ve triple dipped into this La Niña. They typically last for a year or two, and then they kind of go neutral and then they’ll go the opposite direction.
El Niño is a cooler temperature. La Niña is a warmer temperature. Again, we’re in this third year of it. So, it’s just building and building. But we are expecting it to dissipate here over the next several months and go into a neutral phase and possibly even an El Niño as we get into the latter part of the year, which will change our weather pattern from what we’ve seen in the past few years.
MF: Will that have an effect on our winter next year?
MJ: It very well could. But one ill-timed system can really destroy the argument that people want to make.
The problem is that our sample size with things like winter storms is so small here in the MidSouth that it’s really hard to draw conclusions based on a global pattern like that.
We just haven’t had enough of these winter storms to be able to compare them to each other. We don’t have enough of them on record to really draw a strong conclusion.
MF: In general, Memphians will sometimes blame weird Memphis weather on what they call “The River Effect” or “The Bluff Effect.” Is there anything to this at all?
MJ: No, there’s no indication to believe that neither the river nor the bluff have anything to do with the evolution of storms as they approach the Memphis area.