Meteorologist Dominik Jung: Climatologists’ Projections Of Warmer, Snowless Winters “All Complete Nonsense!”

The online German daily Die Welt here looks back at the month of October 2013 in an interview with meteorologist Dominik Jung, who is often widely quoted in the media and runs the German weather site Wetter.net.

Photo: Meteorologist Dominik Jung, Wetter.net.

Overall this year’s October was warmer and wetter than normal, and featured “surprising” snowfall early in the month, followed by warm temperatures, and then punctuated by the fall’s first severe storm at the end of the month.

Die Welt wonders if all that variability, particularly the severe storm, was really normal.

Jung replies that an evaluation indeed shows that “there has been no real increase in storms over the past years. More the contrary is the case.”

Jung then reminds readers that central Europe saw a number of warmer-than-normal and stormier winters during the 1990s and 2000s, but that this trend now seems to be over. Die Welt quotes Jung:

Climate experts leaned far out the windows and declaring that winters with snow and ice in Germany were over. To that I can only say: All complete nonsense! The last five winters compared to the 1961-1990 reference period were normal or even a bit too cold! And at times they were plentiful with snow.”

Die Welt at the end of the interview poses the question of whether 2013 will be “an extreme year”. Jung replies

No, it is an entirely normal year. […] Up to now the weather in 2013 has not been really extreme.”

Model shows nightmare euro-winter

Meanwhile a new seasonal forecast has been put out by Italian weather service Meteo Dolomiti and shows a nightmare shock-freeze winter gripping heavily populated central Europe: If that forecast turned out to be true, then Central Europe would find itself in a big heap trouble.

Fortunately long-term forecasts are not accurate and are highly speculative at best. Let’s hope that Europe’s winter turns out differently.