In the past few weeks there have been many forecasts for the coming winter made online. Most are from bloggers with limited meteorological or climatological training, and should be taken with a large grain of salt. Others, from places like the Farmers’ Almanac, are mysteriously produced and vaguely worded so that they can claim they are right most of the time without providing numbers to allow outsiders to verify their claims. However, there are some sources that are more trustworthy than others because of their known background in weather and climate forecasting. One of these is Weather Underground, a site that was purchased a year ago by The Weather Channel but is run independently. They have just put out a new winter outlook for the coming winter which is full of details on how they made the projections they did. You can find the latest outlook at https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2853&cm_ven=tw-jm
For the Southeast, they show that the models overall are predicting cooler than normal conditions across the Southeast and precipitation values which could be up to 30 percent above the 1981-2010 average. This is consistent with an El Nino pattern in the area, and in fact the blog shows why they think the El Nino is still coming, even though the chances have been downgraded by NOAA in the last outlook.
