By Kirstie Hettinga
AccuWeather.com Staff Writer
(ED-This story was originally released Sept.
11, 2010)
AccuWeather.com Long
Range Expert Joe Bastardi
believes there is a significant chance for particularly frigid winters in
2012-2013 and 2013-2014 into 2014-2015.
Bastardi said these winters could
be similar to winters of the late 1970s.
He said, "While the most
consistent of the cold is to the north, severe bouts of cold deep into Texas and Florida
would be capable of affecting agriculture more so than we've seen in that last
20 years or so."
A combination of factors that
parallel the precursors to historically cold winters is leading Bastardi to
this forecast.
He said, "We have a cold
Pacific now. We had a La Nina, El Nino, then a stronger La Nina [similar to the
cycle] that happened in the early to mid '70s that set up the winters of the
late '70s."
These weather patterns, plus the
wild cards of volcanic activity and solar activity, have Bastardi looking ahead.
"The last time we had arctic
volcanoes go off, in 1912-similar to what we had two winters ago-the winters
three years removed got very bad across the United States," Bastardi said.
"If we put together the
combination of La Nina, El Nino, La Nina again and we look at what happened
when that happened before with a cold Pacific, and we also understand that the
volcanoes may be involved along with the low sunspot activity, one could come
to the conclusion that a series of very cold winters ... could be on the
way," he said.
Bastardi said this is all part of a
natural pattern of reversal which he believes will lead to a crash in global
temperatures over the next nine months, from the very warm levels set off by El
Nino-as forecast globally by AccuWeather.com.
In the longer term, this is all part of a cyclical event
which Bastardi believes will return the earth's temperatures by 2030 back to
where they were in the late '70s at the end of the last cold PDO [Pacific
Decadal Oscillation or El Nino like pattern] and the beginning of the satellite
era of measuring temperatures objectively.