A meteorologist for AccuWeather — the forecasting company that predicted a winter so bad, "people in Chicago are going to want to move" — has a theory for the recent Midwest heat wave: Japanese tsunami debris.

AccuWeather.com made headlines last fall, you may recall, with breathlessly apocalyptic predictions for the season ahead.

Five months later, winter 2011-12 is in the books as the ninth warmest on record, punctuated by a stretch of historically high temperatures over the last week, and the Chicago area remains remarkably populous.

So, what happened, AccuWeather?

"We're wrong sometimes, we can admit it," meteorologist and AccuWeather.com news director Henry Margusity said Wednesday. "It was not exactly the best forecast."

Specifically, AccuWeather said we were in for a fifth consecutive winter of above average snowfall, somewhere between 50 and 58 inches. In reality, just 19.8 inches of the white stuff have fallen, according to WGN chief meteorologist Tom Skilling, not only well below AccuWeather's prediction, but also 14.3 inches below the yearly average.

AccuWeather called for brutally cold temperatures for December and January, and slightly milder mercury in March. Nope. The period of December through February — known as meteorological winter — ran 6.4 degrees above average.

Margusity was a good sport about AccuWeather's swing and miss, even offering up a retroactive long shot theory for the warm winter and recent heat wave — the drifting debris field from last year's devastating Japanese tsunami seems to be sending warm air aloft above the Pacific Ocean, which could be contributing to warmer temperatures here, Margusity said.

"If you match up where that debris field is right now with where the warmer than normal water temperatures are, they match up perfectly," he said, also citing what proved to be a weakening La Nina pattern last fall and the lack of expected so-called Greenland blocking. "The Pacific Ocean is the biggest water body we have on Earth. It will drive the weather."

But, Margusity knows not all will buy the tsunami rationale, first posted on his AccuWeather blog on Tuesday.

"The weather pattern we're in right now has every meteorologist baffled," Margusity said of the stretch that's produced eight straight days of record highs in the Chicago area and could bring a ninth on Thursday. "There's nobody out there who can say 'here's what's happening and why it's happening.' It's as rare as can be."

To be fair, neither Skilling, the National Weather Service nor even the Farmer's Almanac predicted the unusually warm, low-snowfall winter, but nobody was farther off than AccuWeather.

What did Skilling think when he heard the prediction of a looming Chicago exodus?

"I was horrified," Skilling said. "I shook my head when I saw that forecast, and I worried what the impression would be for the public. We just don't have skill at producing seasonal forecasts with that degree of specificity. That should set off some alarms in your head and probably be a signal that the forecast is maybe a little questionable.

"When one player does that, it gives the entire profession a black eye, and it shouldn't. The majority of forecasters didn't make a predication anywhere near that dire."

As for the months ahead? Skilling and Margusity agree, indicators seem to point toward a warmer than normal summer.

"I don't think you should run to the Arctic Circle to cool off," Margusity said, repeating the theme of fleeing Chicago, "but you might want to run to get an air conditioner."

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With the exception of last year's February blizzard, the last horrible winter I remember was 2008-09. I think there were some -15 high temp days in January '09. Hasn't been anything close to that since.

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Kid Cairo's Boers & Bernstein YouTube Channel

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