Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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Remember how, for months, experts acknowledged a sagging economy but debated whether or not it had yet met the definition of a recession?

Weather has something resembling that. Climatologists note that La Nina conditions exist in the central Pacific, but they have not yet met the parameters of being a "La Nina episode."

Translation: Sea surface temperatures have generally been cooler than normal in the equatorial Pacific, but not quite widespread and extreme enough over a long enough period of time to be classified as a full-fledged La Nina.

In our region, La Nina is generally correlated with mild, dry winters. Our winter so far has been neither mild nor dry. But it hasn't been, on the whole, unusually cold or wet either, as I mentioned Monday.

The near-La Nina may be enough to have kept wet Pacific storms from frequently crossing the southern United States, soaking our region, but not enough to cause high pressure off the southeast U.S. coast to deflect cold air masses, as often happens in a La Nina episode.

The atmospheric pattern appears as if it is shifting the next one or two weeks to allow more of these wet Pacific storms to move across the country. But if La Nina conditions continue to hold, drier weather will be more likely in the long run as we head into spring.