Destructive fires in LA, winter blast in the South and Midwest: How NOAA forecasts wildly different weather

As Colorado experiences bitter cold and seasonal-normal snowfall this week, destructive and historic wildfires are burning in Southern California and an extraordinary winter blast is hitting the Bible Belt.

How do forecasters handle such drastically different weather patterns across the U.S.? Denver7 called on David Roth, a senior forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center, for the expert opinion.

Roth said the burden of generating such a variety of forecasts is spread across a large organization: More than 4,000 people work for the National Weather Service, and more than 100 at the national centers.

• Our interview with Roth first aired on Denver7 News at 6:30 p.m., where Denver7 aims to bring depth and new perspectives to the stories that matter most to Coloradans. Watch the exchange in the video player below:

The large employee base allows them to get in front of messaging for major weather events.

While the national weather centers were heavily involved in communication about the winter blast in the South and Midwest this week, local NWS offices in Los Angeles and San Diego began raising the flag about the wind event in Southern California as far back as Dec. 30.

“Now keep in mind, that's 10 days ago, so there actually has been a signal on the model guidance for that long that there was a chance for some kind of an offshore wind event,” Roth said. “They really started ramping up messaging on Saturday and Sunday for this. Actually, on Friday, they had a Fire Weather Watch to get as far ahead of time as they could. They got about five days’ notice, which is really good for a watch.”

Ahead of the strong winds that have fueled the devastating Southern California fires, the NWS office in Los Angeles issued a warning about a "life-threatening, destructive, widespread windstorm.”

“What the local offices in Southern California were expecting was a possible repeat of what happened 14 years ago, where you had wildfires across portions of Southern California. [The Oxnard office] knew that the pattern was similar, so they ramped up the wording accordingly.”

With better technology, forecasters are able to more accurately predict events like this one than in years past.

“Within five days, the weather models that we look at are usually pretty good nowadays,” Roth said. “Twenty years ago, you couldn’t say that. Ten years ago, you couldn’t say that. But nowadays you can signal something like this many days ahead of time, and the Southern California offices appear to have done a very good job with this.”

At least five people were dead, more than 30,000 acres had burned and thousands of homes and structures had been destroyed over three days of forceful winds that fueled multiple massive fires.

Officials told the Los Angeles Times it could become the costliest wildfire disaster in American history.

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The Denver7 Team