As with all long-range seasonal forecasts, the recently issued winter outlook from the National Weather Service can only provide a general overview of how the winter season may work out across the United States, with few of the specifics regarding wintry precipitation that we'd all like to know about. Unfortunately, while the science of climate forecasting does allow for some skill with climatological outlooks, it does not allow for meaningful day to day or week to week forecasts, or assessments of likely snow and ice amounts, as there are simply too many short-term influences involved that can not be foreseen more than a few days to a couple of weeks in advance.

Nonetheless, by following trends in recent years and decades, and using the ability to predict with some success the evolution of the El Nino Southern Oscillation system, which is one of the principal influences leading to this year's temperature and precipitation outlooks. For North Carolina, the general idea is for precipitation...

Step aside, Greg Fishel.  There's a new wintertime prognosticator in town.

A woolly worm named Wilbur won the annual Woolly Worm Festival in Banner Elk last weekend.  He belongs to 9-year-old Noah Jens of Chapel Hill.  By virtue of his winning a series of races against 1,603 other woolly worms, he is the official forecaster for the winter.

Now, how does Wilbur the winning woolly worm forecast winter weather?  Simple.  His stripes tell the story.  Woolly worms have 13 stripes.  Lore says that each stripe represents the kind of weather we'll have for one of the 13 weeks of the winter.  The darker the band, the colder the weather is supposed to be.

According to the Woolly Worm Festival website, Wilbur's stripes suggest we're in for a cold and sometimes snowy winter, with two weeks featuring snow, six more with flurries, and two weeks featuring "below average cold". ...

Much of our area saw our first frost of the season last night, which means that the end of the growing season is just around the corner.  Some areas actually dipped to below freezing briefly this morning, but most of the area dodged the cold bullet this time around.

According to the National Weather Service, most areas in central North Carolina see the growing season come to an end by the last week of October or first week of November; although, there can be some give to those dates from year to year.  The table below summarizes the earliest, latest, and average freezes for the Triangle and Fayetteville.

It's interesting to note that we're in an El Niño right now. According to Jeff Orrock with the National Weather Service, that can have an effect on when we see our first freeze. El Niño events tend to make the growing season a touch longer, but that is by no means a hard and fast rule. Says Orrock, "Looking at the limited number of cases, the...

Ever wanted to know what the odds were of being struck by lightning? 

What about the odds of being injured by a waterspout or dust devil?

There's a new website that's putting numbers to all those odds.  It's called the Book of Odds, and you can search on just about anything — weather-related or otherwise.  Each calculation comes backed up with some kind of source material and a statement of the site's confidence in the actual number.

For example, you are more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 835,000) than to be injured in a mudslide (1 in 79,830,000) in a given year.  One neat — although admittedly potentially morbid — feature is comparing the odds of various things.  For example, if you look up being "struck by lightning", you'll...

So just what does it mean to be "normal", anyway?

Most nights, we'll show a recap of the day's high and low temperatures, and most often, we'll include information about the "normal" high and low for the day.  But what does that really mean?

Without getting terribly technical, the "normals" we show are calculations based on a 30-year period that changes every 10 years.  Currently, we're using numbers from the 1971-2000 period, and in 2011, we'll slide that window forward ten years.  The calculation involves some statistical manipulation, but it comes close to being an average of all the high and low temperatures on a given date for the 30-year period.  (Mike Moss has a deeper look at the technical side of how normals are calculated.)

Problem is, those "normals" don't always reflect what is "typical".  While the normal...