Eric Snodgrass wants you to have a terrible winter.

“I want [farmers] to hate it; I want it to be a super active freeze-thaw cycle,” says the senior atmospheric scientist with Conduit, who was formerly with Nutrien Ag Solutions. “I want there to be rain, ice and snow. … I’d like to dial up about an April 4 blizzard all the way to Kansas, and after that, then everything can be fine. But those are the things that winter can do to undo a drought so that we don’t have to rely on spring rains only.”

Coming off the driest fall on record paired with a weak La Niña leads Snodgrass to say that scenario lends itself to a 6 in 10 chance that next growing season will experience a drought, although he is quick to add “that’s better than 50-50, but that also means four in 10 years it rains, right?”

Looking back at 2024, Snodgrass says a lot of the Corn Belt relied on spring rains to break the previous year’s drought, “and that’s what delayed Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin, in some cases months, [a] month and a half to plant a crop.”

With that in mind, Snodgrass is optimistic about Minnesota’s winter leading to a better growing season next year.

In 132 years of data, Snodgrass says, there were climate districts in Minnesota that had the wettest spring on record and the driest fall. “You had No. 1 and No. 132 all within the same growing season,” he says

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Getting back to that weak La Niña, he says those systems tend to give the state “decent snows.”

“I’d really like to have an April 4 blizzard, a big one at the end, because when that melts, we get to keep some of that water,” Snodgrass says.

He admits the tricky part about Minnesota’s winters is that most of the soil will more than likely freeze over as the new year starts, “which means if there’s no moisture in at that point, it’s going to be locked out of moisture till April anyway. … So, what I need to have happen is I need this winter to be highly volatile with your temperatures. I actually need most of Minnesota to go through an active freeze-thaw cycle. I need the fishing industry to worry a lot, but I need the snowmobile industry to have a great year. And if those two things happen, you’re going to get through a winter that is not going to be so good on your population. They’re going to hate it, but the farming community is going to love it. And La Niña gives you a better chance of that.”

Eyes on the sky

Farmers always have an eye on the sky, and Snodgrass recommends paying attention to Alaska for an indicator of things to come to the Plains. “When we get into December and January, if I start talking about major warmups in Alaska, you’re in for it, because if you’re going to shove all that warm air there, because of the wavelength of the flow of the Rossby wave, you will have colder in the midsection of the United States,” Snodgrass says. “And last year, Alaska was bone cold all winter long. That’s why we were so mild. So, I’m watching Alaska like a hawk right now.”

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Atmospheric science can be an art form, and Snodgrass suggests paying attention to the “negative spaces.” “Artists are good about the negative spaces to make the [painting] jump,” he says. High pressure is the negative space in atmospheric sciences — “it’s boring, it’s light winds, calm skies, but it’s dominant, and low pressure always has to go around it,” Snodgrass says.

He suggests regions east of the Continental Divide keep an eye on the Bermuda high, which is a high-pressure system that develops between the Azores, the Cape Verde Island and Bermuda in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Snodgrass says that if this system shifts toward the U.S. East Coast, Midwestern people love it. On the flip side, people in the southeastern U.S. will burn up.

The Bermuda high set up residence in Minnesota in 2012 and 1988, so should the Bermuda high camp out at Minnesota, 2025 could see a repeat of those two years.

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