40/70 Benchmark

40 minutes ago, HIPPYVALLEY said:

Guess I’ll uninstall this weekend.  

Beauty of central air....

A large proportation of the annual snowfall on the east coast is dirty...meaning that it isn't produced via a Benchmark bomb....imperfect set ups that yield messy returns is how a lot of it comes.

I had over 80" in 2007-2008 that way....systems cutting west running into antecedent cold. I don't expect 80", but you get the point.

6 minutes ago, snowman19 said:

Completely different for you guys. You actually want a +NAO so the SE ridge flexes and sends the storms into the lakes

Those should still get us in C/SNE with some snow, regardless of whether it ends up a mess. This is what I was saying to Bluewave about why we have also been unlucky...we haven't even been able to time a high right to get that more often than not over the past several years.

5 minutes ago, michsnowfreak said:

Ive said this many times, but Ill say it again. Without analyzing anything currently going on, one thing that stands out to me here is the frequency of cold/snowy Decembers in a nina/nina pattern. Whats more, those often immediately follow mild or warm Autumns. Is it a slam dunk? Absolutely not. But when isolating the nina years, the frequency of good Decembers is far above overall climo.

I know December 2022 was mild, but that is due to the record RNA rendering the blocking moot....ALL of the cold dumped west. It shouldn't be quite so extreme this year.

10 minutes ago, snowman19 said:

Agree for the most part but I’m not sure we see strong NAO/AO blocking like we did in December ‘22. The more I look at it, the more hostile I think the NAO/NAM are going to be. As far as the other “analogs” going around twitter (i.e. ‘17-‘18 ‘95-‘96 ‘83-‘84 ‘10-‘11 ‘13-‘14 ‘20-‘21) completely asinine and nothing more than wishcasting 

I feel pretty strongly that December isn't going to be downright hostile...if there isn't NAO/AO blocking, then there should be poleward ridging. I feel better about March for the NAO/AO domain. Remember, while the solar considerations are bit more hostile for blocking than in 2022, the La Nina is less so. Its going to be a bit weaker and more east-based.

2 minutes ago, mitchnick said:

Oh, I'd love to be in your location. Only thing that will save me is my interior location and 600' asleep. That said, 07/08 still stunk here.

If I had your eleveation, then I'd really be sitting pretty. I'm only about 150' here on the interior coastal plane near the MA/NH border.

@PhiEaglesfan712Your thought process is very similar to mine about 3 years ago....you know your stuff, but your thought process surrounding analogs is a bit too reductive and all or nothing. You need to assume a more nuanced approach to analogs and instead of looking to entirely dispell of endorse a particular season, look for the elements that provide value as an analog and those that do not. This is especilly important when we have a basin-wide La Nina such as this one, as these type of events often have mixed characteristics of west and east based events. For instance, I used to only look at seasons that we basin-wide and weak given that is the expectation for this La Nina, but there are just too many variables to be that honed in as far as analog criteria goes. There maybe La Nina seasons in other designations that are far better exatra tropical Pacific matches and or solar matches, for instance.

1 minute ago, mitchnick said:

Sadly, 07/08 isn't much better than 22/23 imby and would go down as an F instead of F-.

See, this is why I think New England has a shot to do well....2022-2023 would have been pretty good with anything less than record low western CONUS heights, which 2007-2008 is a wonderful illustration of.

We are not getting a Pacific as favorable as 2017-2018....zero chance. Nor will there be as much blocking.

14 minutes ago, PhiEaglesfan712 said:

I never really liked the 2022 analog for this year. For one, we don't have a carry over la nina [and one the MEI had as a super la nina] from last season (which dissipated as the season went on). Secondly, the subsurface was warm in 2022, which is the complete opposite of what we have now.

I think 2007-08 is the best analog, but the two biggest questions are (1) will the la nina develop, and (2) if it does, will it be an east-based la nina? If the answer to 1 is no, then a blend of 92-93 and 93-94 might come into play. (Pinatubo really skewed 92-93, especially the summer of 92.) Here is the  92-93 and 93-94 blend:

 

If both 1 and 2 are yes, then we might look into years like 2017-18 and 2021-22. If 1 is yes and 2 is no, then I think the 2007-08 analog is probably the best with what we have to work with, though you could use years like 1998-99 or 2016-17.

2022-23 just doesn't work with the setup we have right now. Maybe for 2025-26 if we do end up getting a la nina that peaks in the summer.

There is a flaw with any analog because they aren't replica seasons...they are analog seasons. 2007 was already well into La Nina territory per ONI and the MEI during winter of 2022-2023 wasn't much higher than it is now...the extra tropical Pacific is very similar. The QBO state and position near solar Max also render it a pretty good polar analog.

Both seasons are good analogs.

Good luck with that Aleutian trough....let me know how that works out.

14 hours ago, CAPE said:

If we get an h5 pattern similar to this, with the Aleutian ridge more poleward and the suggestion of periodic -EPO episodes, we could end up with a good few weeks to a month of actual winter similar to Jan 2022. The other thing you like to see in a Nina is a somewhat southward displaced/stretched TPV. Occasional cold air pressing southward in the flow between the EPO ridge and TPV in a gradient pattern with a well timed wave is a pretty straight forward path to victory for our area in a Nina.

 

The Cansips looks pretty good, too.

17 hours ago, Eskimo Joe said:

I would give real money for a nice 8" - 12" of snow starting around sun rise Christmas Day with temps staying below normal through New Years.

Xmas eve.....

1 hour ago, kdxken said:

Brief mild up.

How do people live there??

24 minutes ago, mitchnick said:

I usually root for your forecasts, but I  hope that one backfires on you. Lol

I don't think the west coast troughing will be as extreme.

2022 is a very good analog...been saying that all summer.

I don't think it's going to be a ++WPO like last year...

2 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

Yup, still an above normal temp regime for the larger environment while humans act confused and try to peddle it was cold .

I get that the aggregatre anomalies in the mean are all that matter for purposes of verification, but those little idosyncracies matter come cold season. No one cares if Windsor, VT only hits 21 instead of 18 on a clear Tuesday night in January, if 31 abd snowing a few days later.

10 hours ago, WxWatcher007 said:

That’s the one. Crazy damage on the Cape. Looked and sounded like a legit cat 1. 

I was in Uganda for that one.

35 minutes ago, snowman19 said:

It’s him finding a way out of his forecast. Just an excuse. He’s been hyping a huge Atlantic hurricane season since the spring. You see this tactic with winter forecasts, they will find anything to say “my forecast would have been right if it wasn’t for the completely unexpected, unseen X that happened, no one could have possibly seen this coming!” @bluewave has shown how strong the large scale Niña like forcing has been for months now. It will not be 100% of the time and that applies to any type of forcing, there will be small scale temporary/transient anomalies and deviations from time to time 

I get it can be annoying to see someone seemingly trying to evade responsibility for a busted forecast in search of validation, but there is always a reason for every busted forecast and I think determining said reason is the important part of forecasting. We all miss some...especially at a seasonal timescale.

Could also end up beng one of those CC patented, fradulent "warm" months when it seems cool during our day-to-day activities, but warmth is realized while we sleep under the cover of night.

53 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Not wise to uninstall.

I agree.

This weekend looks reasonably warm, I think...nothing savage, but...

29 minutes ago, GaWx said:

 

Would love that to persist into the cold season. 

1 hour ago, bluewave said:

Yeah, I also believe the record warmth in the Atlantic is enhancing the Southeast Ridge. 

Its several different factors, which definitely includes CC.

3 hours ago, bluewave said:

It’s also the big changes to the -PDO making it a much warmer pattern than it was before 2014. 
 

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL101078

The fundamental result of this study is that the first EOF of SST in the North Pacific has changed starting in 2014. For more than 20 years, the PDO has been used to describe the state of the North Pacific. However, since the marine heatwave of 2014, there have been remarkable changes to the dominant mode of SST in the North Pacific. The spatial pattern of the first EOF of SST from 1950 to 2021 is notably different from the PDO, suggesting that though the PDO served as a useful metric of SST variations until 2014 (Johnstone & Mantua, 2014), it may no longer be as effective a climate index for the North Pacific. From 1950 until the 2014 MHW, the first EOF remained consistent in its proportion of positive and negative regions with both taking up roughly half the area of the North Pacific (and with the positive region taken to be the eastern Pacific). When EOFs are calculated from 1950 to endpoints after 2014, the first EOF has a maximum positive region covering 77% of the North Pacific, with a PC indicating the largest anomalies on record. These changes to the first EOF/PC of North Pacific SST are nothing short of remarkable.

In concert with these changes, the second EOF/PC of SST has also undergone profound evolution since 2014. This second EOF now accounts for approximately 18% of the variability, growing from 13% during the 1950–2013 period. The spatial structure of the second EOF now is positive over almost the entire basin, with a PC that has grown strongly positive in the last several years. Thus, the second EOF/PC describes warming over much of the Pacific not in the positive lobe of the first EOF.

A relevant aspect of our analysis is that we did not remove a trend from the data before calculating the EOFs and PCs. This is consistent with the original calculations of EOFs in the North Pacific (Davis, 1976) and more recent analysis by Johnstone and Mantua (2014), but inconsistent with the definition of the PDO which did have a global mean trend removed (Mantua et al., 1997; Zhang et al., 1997). Whether or not a trend was removed had little effect on the first EOF, and thus the PDO, until 2014. Two of our results lead to this conclusion: first, our first PC calculated between 1950 and 1993 agreed with the PDO with a correlation coefficient of 0.97; and second, our first EOF calculated with successively longer time series did not change in shape until 2014. There are many approaches to removing a trend from time series (Deser & Phillips, 2021; Frankignoul et al., 2017; Solomon & Newman, 2012). We investigated two of these approaches: first we removed a least-squares fit of a line to the global average temperature as in the original definition of the PDO (Figure S2 in Supporting Information S1), and second, we removed a least-squares fit of a line from each grid point in the North Pacific (Figure S3 in Supporing Information S1). In each case the EOF analysis reproduced the PDO spatial pattern and index, suggesting that the PDO remains a good measure for the variability relative to the trend. In general, removal of a trend (as by least-squares fitting of a line, e.g.,) tends to deemphasize the ends of a record. In our analysis, the inclusion of the trend highlights the fact that the warming in the eastern Pacific has increased notably in recent years, a fact that would be obscured if a linear trend had been removed.

The PDO is recognized to be a result of many processes that may cause temperature variability (Newman et al., 2016) rather than any singular phenomenon. The many processes that affect SST have apparently combined to create both this era of frequent marine heatwaves beginning in 2014 and a fundamental change to the first mode of SST. The persistence of the marine heatwaves was studied by Di Lorenzo and Mantua (2016) who also invoked a number of interacting processes, suggesting that the variance described by the PDO would increase in a warmer climate. Di Lorenzo and Mantua (2016) explicitly removed a trend before calculating the EOFs of SST, so that their EOFs described variance relative to the trend. The PDO is based on a constant spatial pattern defined by the EOF that described the most variance of SST through the mid 1990's. However, there is no guarantee that the EOFs of SST will remain constant as climate change continues. This concern about indices based on EOFs applies also to the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (Di Lorenzo et al., 2008), which describes variance in sea surface height.

The PDO is widely used as a measure of temperature in the eastern boundary upwelling system along the west coast of North America (e.g., Weber et al., 2021). The period of persistent marine heatwaves since 2014 has made the PDO less useful as an index of temperature in this region because it does not reflect the recent increase. In general, using PCs from a basin-wide analysis as indices of temperature for specific regions may be problematic because the influences from distant parts of the basin affect the PCs. Options moving forward may include: (a) updating the definition of the first mode of temperature variability, as we have done here, (b) explicitly accounting for the trend in addition to the PDO for a measure of temperature, or (c) defining a new temperature metric in a specified area in the region as is done for the various measures of El Niño (Trenberth, 1997) or more recently as in the NEP index (Johnstone & Mantua, 2014). Interestingly, the NEP was first published just before the recent period of MHWs, and the value of the approach championed in Johnstone and Mantua (2014) has only increased. The wide-ranging effects of the recent period of MHWs are likely to be seen in continuing studies of the eastern North Pacific.

 

 

23 minutes ago, Stormchaserchuck1 said:

Highest temperature even recorded in Australia in the Winter today, 106F. This is after the great -4 to -5 AAO. I think the same pattern is present, and for some reason these negative AO and AAO events are accompanied by warmer temperatures in the mid latitudes +days. I say that to have an average to good Winter in the east, we absolutely need the Pacific in tune. 

I agree with this. We don't have the margin for error that we used to, but I also think that some of this in the northern hemisphere is due to the +AMO as well.