Terpeast

It’s calm for now but the winds are coming later this evening. 70/55 here in ashburn

Low of 32, but no frost.

Agree this nino is for real, but I hope it doesn’t get too strong. It seems like we get 2-3 more nina years after every super nino.

Better hope we get some (any?) cold air with that. It doesn't have to be "that" cold. Just cold enough.

Good analysis but I don’t think the atmosphere is going to switch modes that quickly. It’s been a nina for 3 years, and it’s not gonna flip on a dime. Let’s see late summer/early fall whether we see a reset of the entire NH pattern.

Doing the Opposite George thing to bring back our snow?

I don’t think we’re getting a super nino. -pdo/-pna will put the brakes on that. Maybe +1.5 to 1.7 at most. We may not even get out of neutral territory once we get past Spring.

At least the -pdo gets reversed somewhat

Technically it did snow, but only for a couple hours and it didn’t stick. And interior NE got 20-40”. So you got the window right. -pna and lack of real cold killed it for the MA

Heavy rain for an hour at 41. Stopped for now. Ashburn.

Before the SSWE, I thought vortex was pretty strong this winter. Siberia had record cold much of Jan and Feb

Would have to be modeled to see, but my hypothesis would be a faster jet stream with stronger storms.

And, this is just a bit of speculation (mods, feel free to move this if warranted)… have you observed less separation between NS and SS? With the hadley cell expansion (if that’s indeed happening), are these two streams increasingly being squeezed together to produce just one dominant stream instead of two separate ones? Or am I going too far out on a limb?

If I remember correctly, the Jan 96 storm was a NSer that dove from canada far enough south to become a miller A monster. And that was technically during a weak-mod nina. It was a very cold storm, too.

I think you meant nina, not nino. But I get the idea. My point is that I’m not yet fully convinced that the SER is a cause rather than an effect of some other forcing (likely pac driven - in fluid dynamics, most of the time, you have to look upstream for a cause). But if the SER persists with a totally different pac, qbo, iod, enso phase, then I would have to really consider it as a cause - a new forcing - not as an effect of a known forcing.

We still have a strong and broad aleutian ridge, and I think even though the nina is dead, it will take a while to flush the entire NH pattern out, including the SER. Now if we get a SER popping back up in the middle of a moderate-strong nino in October, then I will definitely be much more alarmed.

Since 1972-73 keeps getting mentioned, I checked temperature records at IAD expecting a DJF torch. But no, DJF temps were close to normal. It only warmed to above freezing whenever precip rolled in. And there was that deep south storm that dropped more than a foot down in Georgia. Must have been incredible bad luck in what should have been a decent winter with a nino.

If you told me this last November, I would have been confident of one hit. Still wouldn’t have gone above climo snowfall because those blocks weren’t going to happen in Jan or Feb

Worth noting that it predicts W atlantic ssts will cool to near to slightly above normal

Safe to say he's not gonna take the bait.

Realistically we may only get up to 16-19” average in the next up period.

Because the high usually falls on the east side of a ridge (and/or west side of a trough), we need the pna ridge to sustain itself like a standing wave to keep the high from moving out too quickly. But the pna ridge kept getting shoved over by that wavetrain crashing into the west, allowing the cold dome to spill off the coast clearing the way for incoming storms to cut. We can trace the culprit to the Aleutian ridge supported by the -pdo in the last 7 years, five of which were ninas and only one a nino that couldn’t overcome the pac state. I think it’s all pretty clear to me “what” the culprit was. Now the “why” behind that culprit - that’s where the debate is.

It’s technically dead now, but I think we need to go through the summer to fully flush this atmospheric pattern out and allow a new one to set in.

What is considered to be the line between a strong vs super? +2.5?

Yeah, the sst gradients was what I was thinking. But I haven’t thought about trade winds and sst differences between east pac and the MC. I’m sure it is a lot more complicated than temp differences between the mid-lats and tropical pac.