Bracing for winter weather in Western New York

Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Buffalo winter is nearly here as the temperatures are already dropping all around Western New York.

Paul Pastelok, senior meteorologist and lead long-range forecaster for AccuWeather, says this may be a back-and-forth winter for Western New York.

"The overall outlook is actually a little back and forth when you look at the winter season. And we're going to have our periods where we do get some cold weather, especially early on here this year, different from last year. And I think we'll see even by December, some snow flying pretty quickly here and a couple of events that could come through and lay down some snow. Especially looking good south and east of Buffalo for the ski areas early on, something that we kind of lacked a little bit of last year, but it picked up as the year went on."

Pastelok says that while it is tough to predict this far out, there is a general range of snowfall Buffalonians can expect.

"This is always difficult to predict. This far out, we do put out a range. We're one of the few that do that, because we do a lot of research and we look at a lot of things other than modeling. And what we're seeing, you look back at last year, we had 71.3 inches for the season, the normal is around that 95 inch range. We're predicting a range of about 75 to 100 inches this year.

Temperature's have varied in Buffalo throughout winters over the years.
Pastelok details the forecasted temperature outlook for the Buffalo area.

"The Great Lakes are very warm early on, that will have a little bit of effect near the Lakeshore as far as temperatures go, especially nighttime temperatures, keeping them up a little bit. The pattern does not look ferocious, at least in the first half, but we will have some cold shots mixed with the warm shots," Pastelok said. "But the problem is, a lot of the activity with this, what we call week La Nina coming on. A lot of the stuff goes into the Pacific Northwest and also California. That airflow is the marine type, and by the time it gets to the east, it warms up, and I think that's going to keep these departures overall above the average here in the east."

Pastelok also says we could see some strong events this season due to the polar vortex, looking back on years similar to this one.

"The polar vortex is always there," he said. "Our research shows that during these types of situations that we're seeing this winter, they don't happen frequently. But when they do, looking back at 2008 and 1989, years that look a little bit similar to this year, they were very strong events that happened late in the season. And so we are going to be looking at February for the potential for the polar vortex to have some impact on our region."

It's never too early to get prepared for winter weather even though the official winter season is a couple of months away.