raindancewx

That error comes up when data is moved/deleted/discontinued. I've uploaded my winter outlook in the general section for anyone curious. I do have you guys much colder than last winter, but you still kind of get shafted in my analogs. I'm not sure why, but you do tend to have a dry spot in the volcanic El Ninos over the Northeast. Tends to show up in the -PDO El Ninos too.

-2.11 PDO for September. https://oceanview.pfeg.noaa.gov/erddap/tabledap/cciea_OC_PDO.htmlTable?time,PDO It's more directly/strongly correlated to US temps than El Nino or La Nina. Also more "extreme" in the abstract than the El Nino currently.

I've uploaded my winter forecast for anyone curious. Last year I had the West pretty cold. It's a pretty different set of circumstances this year, but in some ways it may not be too different. I hate how long these damned seasonal forecasts get. I made mine 30 pages this year, and many of them are just pictures with no text. It's much easier to show than to explain over and over. Anyway, topic link is here -

I've uploaded my outlook for 2023-24. Here is the link: https://www.scribd.com/document/676713540/2023-24-Winter-Outlook General themes: I matched each three month period starting Feb-Apr to various years in the past to build my analogs, and then rolled the blend forward. I built those analogs with El Nino following La Nina, -PDO, -QBO, volcanic, high solar years in the abstract. I have this as a 28.0C (+1.5C ish) El Nino in winter. Premise is the -PDO look wins through Nov maybe early Dec when it is more correlated to temps in the US than El Nino. Then in Dec, record/near record hot Nino 4 is more correlated than Nino 3.4 or the PDO to US temps so that wins. After that, ENSO mostly wins, but with some input from the -PDO. On net, the winter time -PDO is a wet signal for KY/TN and a cold signal for the Northwest. So I dragged the cold somewhat west of its usual placement, and the analogs shift the dry zone that normally sets up somewhere east of the Ozarks and west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Outlook includes monthly temperature maps, snow maps, and I tried to explain how I "sanity check" my analogs by looking at what the precipitation pattern looks like in the tropics v. what the matching MJO pattern looks like and how the MJO pattern matches US temp profiles. I also have a slide with the 500 mb pattern for July-Sept rolled forward to Dec-Feb, and another slide with a look back at how that went last year. Last year was a good outlook overall for the season (had a severe March, following a cold West, very hot East look for winter), not so great by month though. Suspect this year will be similar in the sense that the seasonal look is better than my monthly looks.

1994-95 is when all the sulfur fell out of the sky from what I've seen. So the cooling / aerosol effect vanished all at once for a period of rapid warming. Here is a quick look at why I'm optimistic for Southern snow this year. All of these dates are "clusters" in my analog group, i.e. periods when the same date shows up across multiple analog years for seeing measurable snow in Albuquerque. It's like...13 periods. Surely some of those have to be big storms for other areas? By the way, the Bering Sea Rule implies that the first date could verify. Big system south of Kamchatka on 10/10 should pass over the Southwest US in 17-21 days per the correlation point rule. You can see the quiet spell around 3/1 plus or minus two weeks. That's my target period for big eastern storms. It'll be in the transition from healthy El Nino to La Nina in Summer, so "weak El Nino conditions" and/or Modoki influence, with the least interference from the -PDO. You also have the standard MJO / harmonic signature in the snow data in the analogs, at 45-day separation between events for the italicized, bold, and underlined events. You can see though...1972-73 was awesome. Shame it's not a better analog. Oct 29-31 (2009, 1991) Nov 12-15 (1972, 1991, 1997) Nov 24-28 (1972, 1982) Dec 8-12 (1972, 1982, 1997, 2009) Dec 20-21 (1951, 1991, 1997) Dec 26-30 (1972, 1982, 1991) Jan 9-13 (1972, 1991, 1997) Jan 25-31 (1972, 1982) Feb 3-4 (1982, 1997) Feb 15-18 (1972, 1997) Mar 13-20 (1951, 1972, 1982, 2009) Mar 24 (1972, 2009) Mar 29-30 (1972, 1997)

One of the more fascinating things about the big volcano + El Nino blend is that they all seem to feature an unusual (for an El Nino anyway) dry spot in the Northeast. It's not just the recent eruptions either. So 1991-92 and 1982-83 have the dry patch, but years like 1963-64 that also had tropical eruptions of lesser magnitude seem to feature it too. It's not like 1991/1982/1963 are particularly similar El Ninos, or in similar background states for other features. So I do think it's somehow tied to the ITCZ getting messed up to the north/south of the usual spot from volcanic activity.

The precipitation pattern on the Canadian for the winter has been bugging me for a while. It does resemble 1951-52, 2004-05, 2006-07 though. Greatest concentration of wetness is West of 180W here at the equator, with precip from Australia into the Indian Ocean as the greatest dryness concentration. That's what the Canadian shows too. It's a psuedo MJO 6-7 look, mostly 6 (very wet west of 180W, dry by Indonesia into the Indian Ocean, a streak of rainfall into the Pacific at 120W), which matches what you get from 1951-52, 2004-05, 2006-07. I don't think 1951, 2004, 2006 is the right look per-se, but this is kind of how I sanity check stuff.

I was referring to December in my post. But if the month is +5 or +8, it is pretty hard to have even a seasonal winter, for Dec-Feb, that's all. I'm relatively optimistic for the South actually for snow. I think it's kind of a warm pattern when dry with cold storms, but we'll see.

By the way, we're still a buck short and a day late compared to the strongest El Ninos even using the conventional methods. Nino 3.4 was 28.0C in August in 2015, we're just getting there now. I really don't see this event getting much stronger, if at all, at the surface. When I run comparisons of the last 100 years locally, the only strong El Nino that is consistently similar for temps and precip is 1982. So I'm assuming we are only around 28.0C for Dec-Feb in Nino 3.4. The strongest events are closer to 29.0C. The similarity testing I do for various US locations shows that the stronger El Ninos are much better matches for precipitation patterns than for temp patterns. That's why I'm dulling 1982 with 1951 in my outlook and primarily using the other years for spatial precip matches.

Without a strong Modoki signature, the warmth in Nino 4 is an extraordinarily powerful warm signal for you guys in the East. >29.0C Nino 4 in December >29.25C in Nino 4 in the East >29.25C in Nino 4, no Modoki signature. Keep in mind...we're 29.8C now. Could theoretically hit 30C+ for the first time with this event in Nino 4. Trend seems to be more pronounced recently too - like it doesn't seem to work below 29.0C.

One thing I'm toying with for my outlook is the relative influence of the PDO and ENSO on US temps. I'm going to put these here so we can see which wins out monthly. The PDO isn't important in Dec/Mar for eastern temps regardless of the phase. But it is fairly important in the other months. For October, the -PDO signature (strong for warmth Plains) is winning out, even as the pattern has flipped. El Nino favors the opposite (cold East of the Continental Divide) but only weakly. Nino 4 over 29/29.5C is just about as reliable as a warm signal as possible for the East in December. Here is ENSO -

1982 is still a pretty solid match for precipitation patterns in the US with this event. You can blend it with years like 1951, 2012, 2021 and get similar results, or you can use anti-logs. Either way it's relatively easy to get a matching blend. 1982 by itself is really close enough that it doesn't need another year added.

You guys will do fine for snow this year. I just don't expect too much cold even in the snowier part of the pattern. I'm expecting some pretty big ice storms across large areas of the US as well. I think you'll have a lot of setups in the wetter systems where it is cold enough for part of the storm, but not the entirety. The good news is I think a few of them will go rain to snow, which at least to me is better than snow to rain.

The El Ninos I like for winter generally have the start of October cold snap in the same place as this year. I take that as a good sign. Although some of the other El Ninos do too - 1976, 2002 for instance. But 1951, 1953, 1976, 1982, 2002 are all decent for October so far. Will change obviously. Fairly normal -PDO look so far. The +20-25 in Minnesota is certainly in the right spot - and it's hard to imagine it burning off by 10/31, which means the correlation will be "right". Minneapolis is still +15 or something through 10/5. All remaining days would need to be colder than -3 v. averages there just to go back to average. Also, the Euro plume for Nino 3.4 has backed off some more. More likely than not it won't get to +2.0C in any given month now. I still like +1.5C (28.0C) for winter, but I could see 1.7C or something too.

I have all the main ideas / justifications for my forecast in my head but I haven't finished writing them out yet. For now, here is Accuweather's outlook. It's pretty similar to what I'm expecting, although I'm a bit more bullish on snow in some areas. I'm also warmer than this in the Southeast/Southwest and a little colder in the Northwest. I don't really expect any part of the US to be more than 1F below average. I'm basically on board with the El Nino turning into a Modoki - but I think its too late for winter. Likely a Feb (earliest) to Apr thing. But since the event should weaken east to west, the early (likely terrible) guess is we get a major east-based La Nina next year, which will be a horrible winter for the West, and probably pretty cold and snowy in the East, following something like 250-350 Atlantic Ace and hurricanes into November. https://www.accuweather.com/en/winter-weather/us-winter-forecast-for-the-2023-2024-season/1583853

Monte Carlo simulation is actually a pretty good way for them to handle the MJO. It's pretty noisy as a signal. It's much simpler just to use the 60 and 70 percent composites for warm/cool, wet/dry on the MJO site. The real question I suppose is why no one reads what the CPC stuff actually means before quoting it. The placement of the greatest precipitation anomaly for winter on the Canadian is actually reminiscent of phases 6-7, both of which are warm in the East. Of course any time I say something like this, it's ignored or some random idiot on here yells at me on my Twitter for a few days. The centering of the enhanced moisture never really gets east of 180W in a given month, which is not a particularly cold match for the East on the MJO composites. The real MJO/RMM stuff tends to have little motion or conflicting patterns in stronger El Ninos, so I'm just using the general look for illustration. I don't think the actual "MJO" will be a main issue this winter. Keep in mind, this is what last year looked like on net - it was a clear phase four-five look (top right, i.e. cold West), with pronounced wetness by Indonesia sandwiched East & West by dryness in Nino 4 and the Indian Ocean. So yes, this stuff does have some skill.

A blend of 1982/2012 with 1980 taken out to amplify it was actually ~close (B ish) globally for 500 mb in July-September. If you roll that period forward, you end up with a look that is pretty similar, albeit tilted, to my analogs for winter. That said, I don't expect the fruition of this pattern to be as extreme as shown for all three months. It should be a dulled version for DJF, with only one major severe period. That's been my thinking for a while. I was pretty happy with 1984/2012 as a matching Summer blend last year, and that worked OK for winter. This year, I think 1982/1951 is a better blend for temps/precip overall, but 2012/1982 is probably better at 500 mb, and the results are similar anyway.

So now that almost the entire country is forecast to be warm in October, particularly in the East, the near exact opposite of the famous eastern years like 1965, 1976, 1977, 2002 and 2009, even 2014 and 1957 to some extent are we still pretending those are the top analogs or what? I haven't been following much, since I'm finishing up my forecast. I would have liked to see the Canadian show the Northwest colder this month per my ideas, so I'll refine them a bit more, but this is still a decent match to my unweighted blend for winter. I do think it's fairly likely this is not the right pattern for October anyway. The models kind of suck at forecasting October and March. Some of you guys must have some kind of match that's at least half decent by now - let's see them.

Still looks like a blend of strong / east based El Ninos, with 1993 subtracted out to fix the PDO. I've mentioned this on/off since August. You do have to warm up TX to account for persistence and the prior dryness. We've had this pattern on/off since June at this point, parts of the East/West normal/cool with the middle of the US warm, and occasional flips to the exact opposite. If that doesn't reset in October, there is no reason to expect it to not continue. The El Nino has weakened below the surface again, which has tied in recently to warmth in TX and the states near it. When we had the warming subsurface, you had a major cold shot in the Plains mid month. If you try a weaker blend, like 1994/2004/2006 on the MEI or RONI, you end up missing the heat and the coolness.

The patterns globally have actually been very El Nino. None of you actually are interested in looking at ENSO surface patterns before the winter because you can post stupid upper level and forcing maps that have virtually no correlation to ground conditions in Summer. There is literally no correlation between PNA and Nino 3.4 in the pre-winter months. 99% of you take El Nino / La Nina as nothing except a PNA sign indicator. If anything August has a negative correlation to Nino 3.4, so you are supposed to have -PNA signatures as we've seen at times in the Summer with an El Nino. PNA is such a weak signature in particular in June-July that CPC doesn't even calculate it. If you're too lazy to know the actual patterns then of course you'll continue looking for signatures that don't exist.

Looking back, there are actually quite a few stronger El Ninos with active hurricane seasons in September. Another silly example of forcing not being used correctly to me. We're at about 65 ACE, and it will grow somewhat more with the storm to hit the Carolinas. A bit ahead of the most active El Ninos in the previous warm AMO cycle. But not dramatically. Most of you seem wedded to the idea that years like 1965 and 1957 were well coupled El Ninos, but of course, the 30-year average ACE in September for 1935-64 is something like 44. The 1991-2020 average is more like 60-ish. So we're not even as far above the recent average as those older strong El Ninos like 1957 and 1965 that I think everyone agrees are well coupled in other ways. A lot of El Ninos actually have pretty impressive early season hurricanes and total activity, call it June-September, and then die prematurely in October from what I can see. https://psl.noaa.gov/gcos_wgsp/Timeseries/Hurricane/hurr.atl.ace.data 1951: 57.8 ACE in September 1953: 58.6 ACE in September 1957: 63.7 ACE in September 1965: 60.9 ACE in September 2002: 46.8 ACE in September 2003: 111.1 ACE in September (if considered an El Nino) 2004: 155.0 ACE in September 2006: 59.6 ACE in September 2018: 72.8 ACE in September 2019: 93.4 ACE in September

Here is what BOM says about declaring El Nino. For my purposes, this El Nino started in March, and is already half over. So it's actually peaking at the surface between now and 11/1. Subsurface will have fits and starts through Oct/Nov before steadily weakening. Unlike winter, the greatest Spring periods for severe cold and precipitation in the West are during the most rapid ENSO transitions. You can look back at Spring 1973, 1988, 2005, 2017, 2019, 2023, etc to see this effect. The joke is the Summer temp profile was a pretty strong match to actual Nino 3.4 SST correlations in the Pacific, despite the constant bitching about how there is no forcing. Who cares? If you're getting El Nino conditions in the expected way, does it matter if not all the signals show up as you'd expect? Given how weak the correlation is, in theory it takes remarkably warm SSTs to drive such a good match - which of course we had in June-August. El Niño and positive Indian Ocean Dipole underway An El Niño and a positive IOD are underway. The declaration of these events, and their concurrence over spring, reinforces the Bureau's long-range rainfall and temperature forecasts, which continue to predict warmer and drier conditions for much of Australia over the next three months. The confirmation of an established El Niño increases the likelihood that the event will be sustained through the summer period. Oceanic indicators firmly exhibit an El Niño state. Central and eastern Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs) continue to exceed El Niño thresholds. Models indicate further warming of the central to eastern Pacific is likely. Broadscale pressure patterns over the tropical Pacific reflect El Niño, with the 90-day Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) at −7.7. Recent trade wind strength has been generally close to average, but was slightly weaker than average across the tropical Pacific in August 2023 for the first time since January 2020. Overall, there are signs that the atmosphere is responding to the pattern of SSTs in the tropical Pacific and coupling of the ocean and atmosphere has started to occur. This coupling is a characteristic of an El Niño event and is what strengthens and sustains an event for an extended period. Climate models indicate this El Niño is likely to persist until at least the end of February. El Niño typically leads to reduced spring and early summer rainfall for eastern Australia, and warmer days for the southern two-thirds of the country. A positive Indian Ocean Dipole is underway. The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) index is +1.25 °C for week ending 17 September. This is its fifth week above the positive IOD threshold (+0.40 °C). The longevity of this trend, combined with the strength of the dipole being observed and forecast, indicate a positive IOD event is underway. All models predict this positive IOD will persist to at least the end of spring. A positive IOD typically leads to reduced spring rainfall for central and south-east Australia. When a positive IOD and El Niño occur together, their drying effect is typically stronger and more widespread across Australia.

My two main analogs for the winter are 1982 and 1951 at this point. 1951 had a major mid-continent, mid-September cold shot. Not exact, but it's a -PDO, east based El Nino...it's more the tilt of the pattern that is off, v. the actual indices per se.

This time of year, the PNA has no actual correlation to Nino 3.4. But the PDO does, and so I do think I'm on the right track going with the PDO as the temperature predictor for the winter and the ENSO as the precip predictor. This is my tentative blend for the winter. It's not super different than the Canadian, although obviously more blue south of Alaska. The out-of-season heat waves in Mexico in developing El Ninos tend to precede very cold periods there. The hot season on the plateau is more like March-May. The heat there means the monsoon process/subtropical jet/moisture etc was moved from its normal latitude to the north or south, allowing dry air to work in, instead of the rainy season. The corresponding movement in the winter allows cold dry air to accompany much colder lows on the plateau and it gets very cold. Years like 1982 have monthly record heat in June, and then severe cold in winter. Again...volcanic Summer in Mexico - 1982 was too. The five hot "developing El Nino" Junes on the Mexican highlands - Most El Ninos are cold in June in Mexico - so it's been interesting looking at those five as a hint for what the subtropical ridges will do.

The Navy guy already linked it a month or so ago, but there is a pretty good paper out about volcanic effects from Tonga. Before this paper, I've mentioned that volcanoes tend to screw up the placement of the ITCZ which has lots of implications for weather outside the tropics. https://essopenarchive.org/users/304243/articles/657090-long-term-surface-impact-of-hunga-tonga-hunga-ha-apai-like-stratospheric-water-vapor-injection I've been saying for ages now that March is favored for very powerful storms in the West with both high solar and volcanic activity. You can see the little blue area for precipitation in the paper for my area. Now look at JJA - it's not a horrible match for the Summer in North America. It was very hot over the Mexican plateau - El Ninos are correlated to warmth in Mexico but it tends to be strongest as a signal on the West Coast there, not inland and high up. The East had a fairly cool Summer. You can see the tendency is to flood Canada with warm air for winter, while Kamchatka / Japan remain cool in winter. That's maybe a pseudo +PNA v. displaced +WPO type look. Long-term impact surface temperature and precipitation anomalies forced by the stratospheric water vapor cloud from Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai.