ORH_wxman

There's a vortex over the Davis Strait though....that's the opposite of the December blocking episode last year. There's also a weak Aleutian low in the N PAC....opposite of the ridge last year. Longer wavelengths in winter prob is a lot colder look

Narrowly missed snow in 2014....I think that was the day Blue Hill got a couple inches but west of Rt 128 didn't get much of anything.

The Modoki index just tells you how west or east based the ENSO event is....so they are calling for a Modoki index of +0.4 which is a somewhat neutral number....basically basin-wide.

It will also be interesting to see how the pattern actually sets up versus the sensible wx results....95-99% of the population will only care about the sensible wx results, but I'll definitely be interested in how we got there. For example, what if we torch this winter but it's because of a La Nina-ish -PNA pattern in tandem with a +AO/NAO (think 2011-12).....a lot of the Super Nino fetishists will start screaming "seeee!!!11!! told ya it would be a torch!!11!" but the irony would be that it wasn't for remotely the reasons they were expecting.

Yeah I've often had a hard time going against the PTSD tide of -PNAs in this forum....really since I've been on the forum. Every time I think people will stop being so scared of them (take the 2007-08 through 2010-11 winters for example.....or 2016-17, 2017-18), we then get a horrific one that sends everyone back to their priors about -PNAs. But I think most of it comes from a caricature of what a -PNA is....when people think of a -PNA, they mostly envision that longwave trough in December 2022 that dug so far deep that it turned the Rose Bowl into a winter wonderland while screwing us out of an otherwise decent chance for something ourselves. Further south it's fair to be more afraid of them, but it's mostly silly in New England. Obviously we don't want anything too extreme like the example above, but we can live with -PNA patterns....our correlation to temps on the PNA is actually pretty weak here. Now all else equal, would I prefer a +PNA? Yeah probably....but it's not near the top of my list.

Not with a high sitting over the Andrea Gail. But it does look like a good cold shot just before Halloween, so some sort of marginal snow event isn't impossible. It's a semi-common time to see some sort of first snow in New England...usually interior and further north, but obviously it can happen over SNE too occasionally. Hell, just 3 years ago was a pretty robust event.

Yeah same here too...we popped a bit more in the past 3-4 days and while I'd still classify it as a below average foliage year, it's not like a bottom 5 which is what it was starting to look like a week or two ago.

Yeah...I mean I'm definitely leery of the strength of the El Nino causing us problems in the snow department, but I am not hugging Super Nino climo at this point for 3 main reasons: 1. We're not even sure this will qualify as a Super Nino (looking increasingly like it might fall short) 2. Our sample in Super Ninos is very small 3. Even if it does technically qualify as a Super Nino, will the warming in the western PAC regions affect it's behavior. (e.g. MEI looks much weaker than a typical Super Nino, and this suggests that the atmosphere may not behave like a typical Super event) The key will be monitoring the strength of the Aleutian low and it's placement....in the typical blowtorch Super Ninos, the Aleutian low set up more in the GOA (Gulf of Alaska) rather than further west south of the Aleutians and it was much bigger/stronger than other El Nino events. Becuase of this, you just see this firehose of Pacific air slamming into the CONUS and not allowing much cross-polar flow or even domestic cold from AK/NW Canada to become the dominant source of our airmasses.

'65-'66 was much colder in the plains and west than '57-'58 was, but yeah, it's not a terrible match east of the MS River. Above average from Great Lakes to New England but below average from about DC southward. It was a decent snow winter for SNE on the whole, but not a great one. Slightly above average for most places here....maybe more like near average for PVD/far southeast areas.

And I'll add that "Soft -PNA" periods could still be very productive for snow if we're getting a favorable arctic. What I mean by "Soft" is that it's not a ridiculous longwave trough swinging down into Baja Cali dusting the Hollywood sign with snow. Usually just some weakness in the western ridge or a shallow trough over the PAC NW....something we've seen a bunch of times before during cold/snowy periods as long as the arctic was cooperating. I'd expect plenty of troughs to swing through the southwest this winter, but probably more due to split flow (with STJ going strong) and not because the polar jet stream was making a surgical strike from Barrow, AK to Palm Springs.

I'd be shocked if we don't have many solid +PNA periods. I don't expect a standing wave +PNA ridge like we had for 8+ weeks in late Jan-Mar 2015, but this El Nino is too strong not to force some decent Aleutian Low/+PNA periods. Whether they are fruitful will probably come down to how hostile the arctic is or not....if we get a shit arctic (esp near the EPO region), then it's probably just another flavor of dsogshit....but a half-decent arctic would probably produce some real fun periods.

It's kind of a '57-'58-esque temp pattern...and that was a big interior winter. Coast did ok too, but the real goods were interior.

Yeah over the interior of SNE, '95-96 is still #1. In fact, in ORH, '14-'15 isn't even #2, it narrowly loses to '92-'93. Regardless, if we can get some good periods of +PNA mixed with a favorable polar domain, then we should have plenty of chances this winter. Hell, even a -PNA/-AO would be ok provided we're not first digging the PNA trough into S CA and Baja first before it swings eastward like December last year.

Yeah I loved the old hour/storm total/snow depth obs at the end of the METARs

Yeah the coast got decent snow on the front end of that post-Xmas storm....it just got matted down with a lot of rain when it flipped while it stayed snow around 128 and west. But that's still a good December on the coast.

Doesn't look quite as bad as some other recycled garbage patterns because you have a pretty strong ridge poking up to the GOA....so even though the EPO isn't strongly negative, you have cross polar flow at least coming from Bering/AK region rather than the source region being the Pacific. The pattern actually looks really similar to Dec 1967...that month was near normal temps, maybe slightly above (in the 1967 context with '51-'80 normals)....but it had some decent snow chances, although you'd probably take a toaster bath in the 12/28/67 storm which was a classic Rt 128 storm where BOS and the south shore struggled while metrowest cleaned up.

El Nino (particularly strong El Ninos) produces a spike in global mean sfc temps because more of the OHC is pushed to the sfc in El Nino.

Yeah I commented that it looked like there was decent cold getting into the CONUS for Dec even if it was mostly west of us....but we know that can bleed over the top at times and setup a gradient storm or two. The ideal scenario is for December to act more Nina-ish and then we flip to classic Jan/Feb El Nino.

Thanks....yeah if we got that type of -EPO in Dec, then we're prob off to the races. That's a Dec '09 look...... though with a west-based -NAO that is more tame than the 2009 steroids version. But that would still be an excellent winter pattern.

What's the track record on that 2 months out? I can't imagine it's great.

That's a great look for Jan/Feb but somewhat ugly for Dec....though at least in Dec you still have decent cold flowing down into the CONUS and not a GOA monster low torching everything, so you'd hope you could sneak in some chances.

I don't doubt that is true. There were also studies showing we were getting more frequent winter -AO "warm arctic/cold continent" patterns in the 2000s/early 2010s compared to the previous 2-3 decades, but that trend obviously did not sustain. Maybe the MJO trend will...my default is to be skeptical of regional trends sustaining which is where the literature struggles the most.

Def trended warmer for the east and gulf coast, but probably colder for the rest of the majority of the country west of the Apps. The pattern actually looks like a colder version of the 2012-13 where that H5 minimum anomaly is out in the rockies....better AK ridging than '12-'13.

The last 10-15 years got my head spinning on a lot of the attribution studies....they often feel like "flavor of the month"....trying to explain a multi-year pattern as something more permanent like those other examples I gave above. They haven't managed to stand the test of time so far. I'm not going to claim that the northeast cannot warm a lot faster than everywhere else for a long period of time, but it certainly would be pretty unusual for that to happen at our middling latitude. That type of consistent (say, multiple decades) higher end warming trend has been almost exclusively relegated to the high latitudes and lower latitude trends have typically fluctuated a lot more.