A week after a blizzard buried parts of Indiana, the state's official climatologist concedes that his forecast for a mild February was a bit off the mark.
Dev Niyogi, an assistant professor of agronomy and earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University, ranks his winter forecast in the could-do-better category.
He had forecast that the winter season - Dec. 1 through Feb. 28 - would include warmer-than-normal temperatures during February.
But as Hoosiers shivered from recent below-zero weather, Niyogi couldn't ignore the obvious.
"We all know it has not been warm, which is what we anticipated it ought to be," he said. "Clearly, we will have to look at what other factors we should be looking at so we have a better outcome the next time around."
Niyogi said pinpointing a storm like the one that dropped more than a foot of snow on parts of north-central Indiana is difficult on a short-term basis and impossible months in advance.
Before last week's storm, he said, three similar systems threatened to lash the state, including an ice storm that stopped at the Illinois-Indiana state line.
Actually, much of Niyogi's forecast proved accurate. As he predicted, December started out cold, and was followed by extreme swings from warmer to frigid days.
But Ken Scheeringa, an associate state climatologist, joked that during the recent blizzard, he had friends call and ask him whether he had turned "the dials" the wrong way.
Niyogi, who became state climatologist in 2005, oversees the office that's the official archive of daily weather observations across Indiana and also studies the state's climate.
The 34-year-old grew up in Bombay, India, and initially wanted to become an engineer. But his fascination with smoke plumes flowing from Bombay's tall chimneys eventually led him to atmospheric studies.
Niyogi received a degree in civil engineering in India and came to the U.S. in 1994 to study atmospheric sciences.
Because of his title, Niyogi fields calls from reporters, something he said he relishes because it gives him a chance to keep weather-related issues before the public.
Telling people that he's the state climatologist is a good line to use at a party, but not during a blizzard, Niyogi said.
Current climate change impact models that consider only one weather variable, such as increasing temperature, sometimes spawn unsubstantiated doomsday predictions, according to researchers at Purdue and North Carolina universities.
Climate change studies that assess the full range of interactions among temperature, radiation, precipitation and land use can better aid humans to prepare for extreme shifts in weather patterns, the scientists report in a special issue of the journal Global and Planetary Change.
This year on Purdue Day at the Indiana State Fair, Associate Iclimate Director Ken Scheeringa and five Iclimate team members drove down to manage the Iclimate booth. Team members answered visitor's questions and met other grad students in the School of Science . Located in the Science Program section, IClimate booth visitors were fascinated by the many double-bottles filled with water, that with a twist of the hand, would produce a swirling “funnel cloud;” here IClimate team member Brian Wolfe explains how this phenomenon occurs.