raindancewx

This is how the pattern has looked so far globally for the winter. I'd say I had the right idea - I thought you'd have the +WPO look, with the blues dipping by the West Coast. Not quite the right severity. The upper air pattern is at least somewhat consistent with dueling cold pockets West & South, as there have been moments when the blues have moved directly over the West. Those heights south of Hawaii and by Japan are usually bad for sustained eastern snow/cold I find. My raw analog blend for winter overall was 1951-52 (x3), 1972-73, 1982-83 (x3), 1991-92, 1997-98, 2009-10, -1993-94. This is why I think 500mb stuff is so dumb sometimes. I had the right idea for North America, but it will be a terrible forecast at the ground level - i.e. for snow, temps and precip.

We had some weakening at the surface in January on the Euro plume verification. We're almost done with this event. I assumed a +2.0 peak around Nov or Dec and then +1.5 for Dec-Feb, so we'll see if that holds. I'd guess +1.2 for February or so. The start of the month does look near +2 again, but I think you are going to see a rapid collapse late month that ties in with the move to more interesting weather in real-time.

I'm still not super-bullish on eastern snow even with the repeat of the cold part of the pattern coming up again. But I did have Feb 16-Mar 15 as the snowiest part of the winter for the Northeast as part of my outlook, and I built the snow analogs in August, as they're actually less sensitive to overall patterns. Snow is...fluky. I find it's better to predict fluky stuff with fluky stuff, and not generalizations, like all the upper level map porn for five weeks in the future you see on here. Here is how we've done so far. I've been too cold everywhere, so snow in the West is above average at high elevations but below average at valley levels. The fluky southern snow has more or less shown up. Northern New England and the area by DC doing OK for snow relative to most of the NE has also worked out fine so far. Obviously Kansas has been a dead-on bullseye for the heavy snow winner as my analogs had back in August. I actually think the misses so far - like CA and the northern Plains - are going to catch up a lot for snow over the next six weeks. I actually think there is a half-assed version of the fun part of 1973 coming. I know people like 2010, and for mid-Feb to mid-Apr, I agree it's a decent analog - but I actually think it's not extreme enough. I think an 1983, 1998, 1973 blend is possible for March for snow. There is some tendency for otherwise relatively shitty El Ninos in the West to briefly turn nuts in mid-Feb to mid-Apr. A lot of the strong dying El Ninos go from a strong WPO look, one way or the other where a lot of the North Pacific is flooded with high pressure, to just an open field of low pressure. I think that's the mechanism for the brief period of intense storminess. Something like 75% of all snow to fall in the last century in March here is ~15 years that are high-solar El Ninos. The Feb 2024 map on the Canadian for the Pacific does look similar (in the Pacific) to the March high-solar/stronger El Nino composite. With the Atlantic warmer, I'd generally push the snowy zones on the maps below 100-200 miles northwest for 2024.

Here is a look at how things stand for snow in the Northeast. It's really been rather dreadful, even compared to 1997-98. I vaguely remember going to some kid's pool party in March of 1998 in NJ, must have been in the 80s. I think it was near 90 at some point in late March 1998 by Philly. None of you actually read my outlooks, but I did have a small area from DC to Philly near normal for snow (90-110% of normal), which still seems plausible, with most others meaningfully below average.

Canadian has a major +WPO look for February. Canadian look does resemble the Feb 83 / 98 blend I showed before. It also has the cold finish to winter in old MX I mentioned in my winter outlook. Someone down there may finish -2 or -3 following a chilly December and mild January with a cold February. WPO if nothing else tends to flood Western Canada with warmth when positive in February. As far as March goes - I don't actually think the cold period will align exactly with March 1-31. I'm expecting a flip to pretty intense warmth late month. The recurrence of the pattern that pushed DC as an example to 80F in January should be mid-March. Maybe DC hits 95F on 3/12? I'm half kidding, but I wasn't expecting 80 in January either. Locally, El Ninos that have high solar activity are notorious for producing heavy snow in March. The stronger, high solar El Nino Marches tend to be pretty expansively...chilly? Like not super cold - I think it is one or two major cold waves in a warm wet pattern, which does seem to fit well with how this winter has gone. The more modern thirty year averages are too cold for what they show March doing. I'd expect a lot of the US to be 1-2 below average after a cold start puts down some snow in a lot of the US, and then it is slow to erode with a rapid warm up late month. The lower solar El Nino / weaker El Ninos tend to not have the +WPO signal for whatever reason, and it's more or less impossible to get heavy snow here in March without those deep Kamchatka lows. Weak El Nino / low solar March, El Nino Stronger, high solar. You can see the flow in the NW Pacific is completely different, almost opposite. The pattern last March, when we sort of had weak El Nino conditions, resembles the first image a bit for the North Pacific.

For all the talk of the Nino being weaker, or the forcing being different or whatever, we've basically gone to a 1982-83/1997-98 temp composite so far. February looks similar, which makes me think it's not a fluke. I did warm it up a degree - but other than the Central Plains being colder and the coldest air being over the Ozarks, it's pretty decent. The good news is March continues to look cold and stormy for almost everyone. That's the month I've been most interested in the Fall, none of the other months really looked particularly cold and stormy to me. The fluky Southern snow event around 1/15 should repeat around 3/1 as the most powerful storm of the entire cold season, with ample tornadoes ahead of it as well. All my analogs with the fluky snow in the south had this 45-days later - so I'm fairly confident in that. Here is February and the CFS on 1/29. I'm sure someone will come in and point out all the ways 1997-98 in particular is different, but ultimately the cold air that winter was in Europe/Asia - and that's what we have this year. Cold in Asia often accompanies warm air flooding North America for weeks at a time, with brief breaks in between. The AO was at least technically negative in almost every month from Oct-Apr in 1997-98, and it just wasn't a cold pattern for North America due to overriding factors. March

So here is a look at the winter so far. This is 42 days in (6 of 13 weeks). It's not really cold anywhere, but as I posted recently, I thought parts of the SE and SW might be a tiny bit below average. Now look, I was way too cold nationally for December. Like, horrifically so. If you go back to my posts, I recognized this pretty early in December. But I want you all to look at what Ray had after I show what I had. Look at how specifically wrong I was, and then look at where he was wrong. This is why I say he copies me. It's literally the same fucking errors with a different blend. Whether I do a good job or not, the same spatial patterns in the errors show up every year in his stuff. Seriously, it's almost impossible to be this similarly wrong to what I had in a given month without at least internalizing the ideas. If you had just picked 1997 / 2015 as an analog, it'd be way closer than what I had as an example. This is my blend minus 2023, and then I just went to Ray's site to look at his stuff, and did his blend minus 2023. I still haven't read his forecast I just searched for the word "December" and went down to the actual five words of forecast material. My favorite part is as late as Nov 30 he has a post that says "December appears on track" before missing by ~8 degrees for the entire country. Me - Oct 10 Ray - Nov 11 - https://easternmassweather.blogspot.com/2023/11/winter-23-24-will-be-lesson-in.html It's the same fucking thing....every year. Again, it's nearly impossible to come up with errors as specific and large as what I had without internalizing and copying the idea. The joke is by mid-month it's actually pretty easy to see how things are going to go. If you look at January, its also fairly similar to what I have, but it looks like there are at least meaningful actual differences.

My personal view is you guys will still end up near average for snow. But most of it will come in a 2-4 week period starting in late February that runs through mid-March. You're not particularly close to the favorable part of the pattern yet. I'm expecting March (at times, not the whole month) to resemble something like this, but with the main features shifted Northeast. I suspect you'd get some off mean-track system that would dump 6 inches of snow in that setup.

This is what I had for 2023-24. https://www.scribd.com/document/676713540/2023-24-Winter-Outlook General idea was the country would be warm, but any cool spots would be in the Southwest or Southeast. I put the +/-0 line about half way through the SE and SW US which looks OK given how warm December was, with January running colder.

My analogs had a small, narrow band of unusual heavy snow in the South. So this is nearly perfectly aligned with I had in my outlook from October. Although admittedly the strip is a bit north of where I had it. You'll notice I had the south as snowy after 1/15 in my outlook. This is because I use...counting indicators for the timing of pattern changes. Anyway this stripe has been on the models for 3-4 days now, so I do think it's legit, though the amounts may end up very different still. You certainly have an air mass cold enough to do this. I'm expecting a pretty big warm up late month, maybe not as early as the models have it. Don't really expect February to be as cold as January nationally, not that the month will finish that cold anyway. MJO is going through 4-5-6 at pretty reliable intervals. So it should get there again in February, likely mid-month to prevent any extensive cold snaps. I actually still think DC and Philly will get to near (probably still below) average snow totals, it's just going to be a 2/16-3/15 thing like I had in my outlook. You'll have plenty of very powerful storms in March again this year but the traffic pattern in the Pacific should break pretty meaningfully as the El Nino dies rapidly.

You don't really forecast anything. It's 40,000 words of blather followed by three maps that are dulled to the point that the composite shows +1 or -1 as your extremes, and you forecast 50 inches of snow in Boston every year. I haven't read anything you've written in years, but I'm sure this is still the case.

The AO and NAO are negative and the north is warm for the US, with Russia very cold, similar at times to 1997-98. The AO in particular was probably something like -2 or -3 on the index in January 1998. I don't know what the obsession is with the Arctic when we're in a pattern where clearly other factors are more dominant for our continent. 10 days ago you were all in a circle jerk about how we'd have the greatest SSW in history by now. We're in a pattern where there is plenty of Arctic influence...it's just been in Asia. My point is always that getting the Arctic setup right doesn't even matter in a lot of winters. Knowing that cold air will dump from the North Pole doesn't mean you know it will dump in the US, or for how long if it does.

This is a strange post, and an example of why I said you're all in denial. Isn't that pattern a decent match to the temp profile we've had this month? It's not like it's warming up anytime soon here. We have multiple days with lows in the teens coming and highs in the 30s/40s, with clouds and snow. I was ice skating on the Rio Grande at 2 pm in the afternoon today. It didn't really get above freezing for more than five minutes. Minneapolis has never finished a DJF more than +7 from what I can see, so that +15 for DJF to date is going to regress back to the mean, but not it's like the five weeks of +15 is just going to vanish overnight either. I'm always amused that you guys seem to think I went cold in the Southwest. I thought small pockets of the SE US and SW US could be a bit colder than 1F below long-term averages. I don't think any of you actually read what I write. I always come up with a composite in analogs and then exaggerate the warmth/cold to account for my instincts and observations. Last year I had the West cold, which was right. This year, I have the South generally +1 to -1, with the north warmer. I had MN to New England +3 on the low end, up to +5 if you take the blend of the raw analogs and the one anti-log. That looks fine for most of you given how warm December was, and how January has started.

I do like to use analogs to verify weather. 1951-52 was one of my two main analogs. It's an East look to an El Nino with a -PDO and it had plenty of snow for you in this time frame. See how the southern part of your area got hosed, just like this week?

Who the fuck is tacoman? I don't live on these forums as a dimwitted foot soldier in the army of progressive cripples like you do.

The city itself has literally had 0.03" below freezing with those storm as snow. They'll still be 60-90% below average ytd.

Boston, NYC, Philly, DC all are above freezing, late at night, with a rainstorm / above freezing snowstorm with the NAO and AO negative, arguably near record lows on their indices in nearly mid-January during an El Nino. I wonder when that will sink in to everyone. Most of you seem to be in the "denial" stage of grief still.

Generally, you just change the signal you want historical info in this link to get monthly data. https://psl.noaa.gov/data/correlation/wp.data Here is December. The +WPO is a pretty big warm Plains signal without much of a corresponding cold signal in the US until roughly Feb-Apr when it's a pretty strong cold/storm signal in the SW. When it warms up the Plains it often bleeds into the East as kind of "sneaky" warmth, i.e. Boston seeing it's third warmest December since 1872 this year. It's generally (not always) very hard for the East Coast to get major cold systems moving up the favored Nor'easter track through the 40-70 benchmark with those heights by Japan. Usually if Japan is snowy with storms paralleling the coast to the east, the US east coast follows. Japan tends to do better for snow in weaker El Ninos, with less snow in the stronger events. Any of that sound familiar? I mentioned recently that I expected the MJO to get back to 4-5-6 by 1/20 - the models do show that now. The MJO has been interesting this year, the rotation is more like 30 days than 45. Not something that's real common in the MJO data back to the 70s.

WPO finished at the highest value on the index in several decades for December, just above December 2006. Dec 1982 had an extremely +WPO look as well, that's one of the reasons I liked it as a main analog. Cold dump on the models is in the right place at the right time based on the lag from an intense +WPO tendency. The high value of the WPO juices up the correlation essentially.

Actually think for you guys the main issue is the West Pacific. Those +WPO setups (Kamchatka lows north of subtropics highs by the date line) at high amplitude completely nullify the -NAO/-AO periods in a lot of years. It's not like we've had only +NAO periods in the Jan 15-Apr 15 period when the NAO is strongest as a signal in recent years. The SE tends to warm up when the WPO goes positive. It's part of why you get what Chuck talks about, the -PNA with -NAO thing. WPO goes negative way less than it used to, and does seem tied to the warming by Indonesia and the Indian Ocean.

Happy January 5th everybody. Snow continued most of the night in ABQ yesterday, so we're at 3.2" now since 10/1. If you use 1.2-5.2" as bounds for Jan 5 in an El Nino, we're on target for 10.8" now, up from 8 when I used 0-2" through Dec. I included near El Ninos 1979-80 and 2003-04 to dull the total a bit too. Almost every year on the list below has major SW US snows in March or April btw. If we make it to January 10th in an El Nino without an inch of snow in the NE cities (very unlikely now for Boston), the totals really start to deteriorate. Boston: <=1" by Jan 10, El Nino -------------------------------- 2006-07: 17.1 (Oct-May) 2015-16: 36.1 2018-19: 27.4 ------------- Blend: 26.9 NYC: <=1" by Jan 10, El Nino --------------------------------- 1965-66: 21.4 (Oct-May) 1972-73: 22.9 1991-92: 12.6 1994-95: 11.8 1997-98: 5.5 2006-07: 12.4 2015-16: 32.8 -------------- Blend: 17.1" PHI: <=1" by Jan 10, El Nino ------------------------------ 1958-59: 5.1 (Oct-May) 1965-66: 27.4 1972-73: 0.0 1991-92: 4.7 1994-95: 9.8 1997-98: 0.8 2004-05: 30.4 2006-07: 13.4 2015-16: 27.5 2019-20: 0.3 -------------- Blend: 11.9"

Nice snowy day today for me. Over an inch of snow at the airport officially. At the end of the day, the East based El Ninos and Modoki La Ninas are often pretty similar weather even though the traffic pattern in the Pacific is completely different. The premise of my forecast was you'd see alternating cold pockets/periods in the South and West throughout the winter. West from the -PDO, South from the El Nino. A normal El Nino would see alternating cold pockets East and South.. I'll repeat what I said the other day though - we're getting very close to the part of the pattern that can produce a fluky heavy snow event in the deep south.

Canadian look for January is in finally. It has weakened the transition of the El Nino to the West, and has a much weaker, but east based look throughout Jan-Mar. By Apr-May, we are rapidly transitioning into an east based La Nina. I suspect the Spring will be a bit like 2005, but it's early. The models have been forecasting to much warmth with this event for months, even at short ranges. So I think a faster collapse of the El Nino is possible. No reason to think we verify on the warm side of the Euro plume.

A lot of disputed MJO movement on the models at the moment. I expect to see phase 4-6 again by Jan 20 or so. We'll see. Wave may die or have competing centers of influence before it gets there though. CPC still looks on board with my outlook for January. I found 1993-94 was a pretty strong match to opposite conditions of this year when I did my outlook, so it makes sense to see the weird storm patterns and ongoing persisting heat to me up there. In the short term January 1973 has shown up on some of these CPC looks for the 6-10 and 8-14 ideas. I suspect we're actually getting very close to the part of the pattern that will support a huge, fluky snowstorm in the South ala 1973. I've been expecting that in the 1/15-2/15 time frame, if it is to happen.

I'd really like to see what the Canadian has for January. No update yet on Tropical Tidbits. Oh well.