ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512220014
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
El Nino, a periodic warming phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean said to moderate North American winter temperatures, may be absent this season, but Virginia's state climatologist, Pat Michaels, said he wouldn't make any financial investments based on it.
But at Roanoke Gas Co., a company whose fortunes are based largely on winter temperatures, a forecast of colder weather would be welcome.
"The El Nino signal is a lot weaker than it's made out to be," said Michaels. "It's not a strong determinant of weather in the Eastern United States."
Michaels, who works at the University of Virginia, said he also wouldn't plan his own energy needs based on the National Weather Service's long-range forecasts of precipitation and temperatures. Even if norms were based on 100 years of weather record-keeping, the forecasts would turn out to be right only a little more than half of the time, he said.
As it is, Michaels said, weather norms are based on a 30-year period from 1961 to 1991. And those statistics are skewed by some very cold winters in the 1970s. The latest one-month and 90-day outlooks for the Southeastern United States, developed Dec. 3, call for above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation, Michaels said.
Leaving the realm of prognostications and crystal-ball viewing, last month was the coldest November the Roanoke Valley has seen since 1976. And Roanoke Gas customers were looking at 30 percent higher bills than last year because of it, according to Art Pendleton, vice president of operations.
The cost of gas from the company's suppliers was down a little from last year, though. That helped offset a 36 percent increase in gas use by the company's customers in November - from 954.6 million cubic feet last year to 1.3 billion cubic feet, Pendleton said.
But officials at Roanoke Gas welcome the return of colder weather. That's because the company makes most of its money during the winter heating season.
Last year, the company had budgeted for earnings equal to $1.36 per share of common stock, based on expectation of a normal winter, and actually earned 7.4 percent less, or $1.26 per share, after a warm winter.
The earnings would have been even lower if the company had not cut back on some of its expenses, said John Williamson III, vice president of finance.
The long-range forecast from the weather forecasting company that Roanoke Gas uses is still saying that the winter of 1995-96 will be roughly normal, Williamson said.
LENGTH: Medium: 51 linesby CNB