Boston is in for warmer temperatures this winter, following last year’s unusually warm and less snowy season, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s season outlook.
The agency expects warmer-than-average temperatures from the Northeast to the Mid-Atlantic, as well as regions along southern parts of the West Coast.
The Northeast has about a 40-percent chance of above-average temperatures — the same as was predicted in 2019, according to NOAA spokesperson Lauren Gaches.
Bostonians have “equal chances of above- or below-average chances of precipitation” from December to February, which was also predicted in 2019, Gaches wrote in an email.
NOAA’s outlook does not project an accumulation of snow because it is unlikely for snow to be predicted more than a week in advance.
Massachusetts saw its first snowfall of the season on Oct. 30, during which Boston received a total of 4.3 inches, according to the National Weather Service. It was the snowiest October on record, with nearly four times as much snow as the previous record of 1.1 inches in 2005.
Gaches wrote that individual weather events like a record snowfall are not necessarily indicative of climate change. But while it’s possible a single weather event is no more than an anomaly, it may also be part of a larger climate trend.
Teddy Amdur, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said whether the mild 2019 winter was a result of climate change is difficult to determine.
“We have seen, in general, an increase on the order of a couple degrees the air temperatures in Boston over the past decades,” Amdur said. “While these seasonal predictions are based upon nuanced patterns, ocean temperatures and El Nino, it’s the longer-term changes that we are seeing in Boston and New England that are tied to climate change.”
Communities can better prepare for upcoming weather trends by keeping up with NOAA’s predictive reports, according to the agency.
Amdur said informing people about these changes is important because weather affects everyone, but added that longer-term trends “might be telling us something.”
“Eventually, the underlying pattern becomes dominant over the weather, and that given enough time, we will see climate change directly affect our day-to-day life,” Amdur said. “It will be so much warmer, so much wetter, that even on a day-to-day level, we can’t ignore that.”
