EXPERTS PREDICT BIG CHILL.

Byline: Staff and Wire Services

Wintry weather will come back with a vengeance this year, and even typically mild California could have temperatures more than a degree cooler than normal, forecasters said Tuesday.

After three mild winters, 2000-01 is going to be cold, really cold, for much of the nation, the National Weather Service predicted in its regular seasonal forecast.

``It's just going to be colder - flat-out colder,'' warned Ants Leetmaa, director of the weather service's Climate Prediction Center. ``It could be one of the coolest (winters) of the last decade. There's a 50 percent chance that there's nobody in the country that's going to feel warm relative to at least the last three years and probably the last 10 years.''

Already, the Los Angeles region has experienced one of the coldest and driest Novembers on record. The average low temperature at the Pierce College weather station in Woodland Hills for the entire month of November was 36.2 Fahrenheit - tied with 1994 for the second-coldest November since record-keeping began in 1949. The coldest average low, 35 degrees, was recorded in 1990.

The rest of the nation will experience temperatures 1 to 6 degrees cooler, Leetmaa said.

It's going to hit us hard, for two reasons.

First, a decade of unusually warm and mild winters will make this one feel especially cold, said National Weather Service Director Jack Kelly. He predicts at least three more super-Arctic outbreaks like the one that froze the Midwest last week.

Second, fuel shortages and high fuel prices are likely to make the cold especially painful, given recent reports from Louisiana and Texas that natural gas production is declining just as demand is rising.

``If we have, in fact, declines in gas production, along with colder weather, it's like a double whammy,'' said Jim Osten, chief energy economist for Standard and Poor's/DRI, an economic consulting firm. ``It'll be a very tough winter.''

Natural gas, in particular, which last year cost $3 for a million BTUs, now runs about $10 for the same amount, Osten said, and could go higher.

Heating oil this winter will average $1.52 a gallon, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That's 34 cents higher than last winter.

The cause of the unusual cold is the Arctic Oscillation: a belt of air below the North Pole that affects the climate in much of the Northern Hemisphere. In the late 1980s and 1990s the Arctic Oscillation was relatively warm, and so was the United States. In recent months, it's grown colder.

The effect is to push the jet stream far south, as far as Tallahassee, Fla. The jet stream carries frigid arctic air south with it. The last time this happened was in the late 1970s, Leetmaa said.

What does this mean for global warming?

It's still happening, said D. James Baker, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Through October, 2000 was the warmest year in U.S. history, meteorologists said. Now, because of cold weather in November and December, it will be the fifth- or sixth-warmest year.

``This year came in like a lamb - warm and dry - and it's going out like a lion,'' Kelly said.