Snowy Winter For Region 8?

My job is to forecast for the next 7 days and go on your TV, phone, tablet, and computer to tell you what to expect. There are some people that do long-term forecasts. Their typical customers are insurance, energy, and agricultural companies.

One of those long-range forecasters is Joe Bastardi of www.weatherbell.com. Joe has recently been discussing the upcoming winter and has mentioned that Region 8 should expect MORE snow this winter than an average winter.

He specifically highlighted two winter seasons that we should look at to make a comparison, the 2002/2003 winter and the 2009/2010 winter. I decided to pull some data from those two winters and they were rather snowy!

Let's start with looking at the Jonesboro snowfall totals for the past 10 years. For some reason, the snowfall data is not available prior to 2004. Click image to enlarge:

In the above image, you can see that the 2009/2010 winter season had a lot of snow, with over 13" for the season! I remember that winter well. This was NOT the Ice Storm winter... that was the 2008/2009 winter. During the 2009/2010 winter, we did A LOT of sledding....

Since the Jonesboro data only went back to 2004, I decided to look up a few more locations. Here is Corning, AR and notice the two snowiest winters... 2002/2003 and 2009/2010:

And finally, here is Pocahontas, AR... Once again, the same winters were the snowiest:

So, if Joe Bastardi is right and the upcoming winter is like the 2002/2003 and 2009/2010 season, get the sleds ready!