Carvers Gap

I put my garlic and shallots into one of my raised beds yesterday. Figured the upcoming seasonal to AN(but not extreme) wx will get them off to a good start before the first inevitable freeze hits at some point during the next few weeks. My garlic is definitely a testament to @Stovepipe's sharing about his garlic harvest a few years back. This is my second year growing. I had never attempted it prior to reading his post. Shallots are a new venture.(probably tried some during the wrong time of year several years ago) Some folks call them multiplier or potato onions, because one bulb will produce many over the winter and early spring. I am still shocked that my "cool weather" crops have done so well given the record temps of the last few weeks. The only thing that just came up and was like, "Nope..." was spinach. Everything else has done very well considering the temps and drought. I think it is due to an odd, but useful setup in my garden in relation to sun angle. During the summer, the angle of the sun provides direct sunlight all summer. However, during the fall, it drops just enough into the southwest that the tops of some tall trees shade the garden in the afternoon. Anyway, if you all garden...this is perfect time to plant garlic. Just let it sit all winter, grow during the spring, and harvest as the tops brown and fall over next summer. Filaree Farms has a great site for pretty much all root crops, but especially for garlic. They have a growing guide as well.

....but the current heat ridge gets the W!!! LOL.

You should be good to go. I am kicking myself for not putting out a late season crop of beans. They would be loving this weather. My cool weather crops are doing OK despite the record heat. Maybe the days getting shorter and longer nights is giving them just enough of a break.

Yeah, I agree. I thought the Nino look was going to diminish more than it has based on last month's trajectory and outlook, but the recent positive look might actually hold through winter. Definitely has cooled off in the eastern ENSO regions, but still likely to produce a weak Nino signal, maybe a Modoki. The SOI seems to agree the Nino effects are still there, because it is really tanking. Might be one of these winters where the weak El Nino signal gradually fades...

Thanks. Any thoughts after looking at that? Looks like a weak signal for below normal precip. Maybe it is signaling a strong +PNA pattern? Looks like it favors a split flow pattern with California and the southwest getting AN precip. @raindancewx, that would be a big bonus for you all. Will be interesting to see if La Nina eventually develops next spring.

@jaxjagman You are on your game this week, man. Another good find. Yeah, the JAMSTEC and the Euro Weeklies/Seasonal were just terrible. I hesitate to mention the CFSv2 because it puts out about four different solutions per day. A broken clock is right twice a day regarding the CFSv2. What I like about that run is that it might be closer to the ENSO set-up than the CANSIPS...oddly they both give similar surface maps. The SSTs for the JAMSTEC look more accurate globally as well. Does make me wonder if the JAMSTEC has a cold bias over NA after its solutions last winter. I also think that modeling had a really difficult time "catching up" last winter and was dealing with feedback issues. One looks at the SOI last winter, and a bust was on the table then. Thanks for the share...at least that looks more reasonable than the CANSIPS given the current Pacific basin warmth. Jax, do they release a precip anomaly map with that season package? If so, how did it look for our area.

Cover crop consisting of rye, winter wrye, winter peas, crimson clover, and vetch are growing like they are on steroids. Probably will turn that under in December or very early spring. Mustard greens are up. That stuff has some pop(spicy). I am also trying some Pak Choi this fall. It is purple and green. I am a big fan of William Woys Weaver who is known as someone trying to preserve heirlooms with great taste. My fall lettuce is from his collection at Baker's Heirloom seeds. Hopefully the cool weather stuff doesn't fry this week in the heat. When all of that is harvested later during the fall, I will plant those rows with winter wheat. Trying to get the soil ready for next spring as it has been fallow for twelve months.

With no sharp gradient(Typhoon Tip) in SST temps on those maps above...I agree, all bets are off. Also, Isotherm has talked about how the warm Pacific created a really strong jet that just plowed into the Northwest this past winter. Again, evidence of deep mountain snows in western WY and western MT revealed that. This winter, tough call as not many analogs fit the Pacific basin wide warmth. The MJO also was abnormally strong last winter along with an atypical SOI. I am still leaning towards my original thinking for winter which I wrote in mid-June somewhere in the Spring/Summer thread....but still a long way to go and things can/will change. For a time last month, I thought we might actually go to a La Nina State which would have tanked my early forecast on the spot. As of now, it looks a bit more like a Nada on the weakly positive side - but a funky setup as some Pacific equatorial regions will be almost Nino and some almost Nina. As D'Aleo mentioned, need to get through hurricane and cyclone season and then see what the SSTs look like.

@Stovepipe, I put my cover crop in the ground on Sunday and it was up on Tuesday morning!!! 36 hour germination rate....I have never seen anything like it. I think the warm ground temps and steady rain in combination were just about perfect. Some of the stuff(whatever is in the grass family in that mix) today is ~2" out to the ground.

Impressive and thanks for the information and the share. That is A LOT of compost volume standing there.

Yeah, I was worried about that vetch...I already have it in my garden anyway! LOL. 120!? Wow. I assume you are hosting the TN Valley Wx Spaghetti dinner with that much tomato action! Keep us updated on the hemp situation. How do you market that? I am assuming that is the for the oil which is a big time product right now. Hey, at least you won't have to can all that hemp. Definitely going to need a pic of 10-12 foot plants!

@Stovepipe, my garden remained fallow this year. Going to plant a fall cover crop which I have not done prior. Going to roll with a mix and see how it works. Likely will order some garlic as well...was awesome a couple of years ago. Here is what I am using...thoughts? Hey, and how has your gradient been this summer. I am glad to not be watering through this heat! https://www.johnnyseeds.com/farm-seed/cover-crop-mixes/fall-green-manure/fall-green-manure-mix-cover-crop-seed-2613.36.html Probably going to add some fall salad stuff and definitely some garlic.

So in honor of me saying that analogs are likely untrustworthy as we approach the winter season, let's look at where we are today...or close to it. Oddly, I have tried to remember the summer of '93 and can't remember it. Well, there is a reason for that. I wasn't in North America! I was in the Middle East all summer(non-military). What I do remember is news of the Mississippi flooding. Anyway, I can find a few similar times to where we are now in terms of the ENSO cycle. 93-94, 95-96, and 05-06. 95-96 had more of a La Nina raging by August than now...so I am going to discard that for the moment. However, the summers of 93 and 05 looked fairly familiar in terms of the actually look of the SST temps vs comparing graphs. August 12, 2019 August 1993 August 16, 2005 Here are the composite temps for May through July for 1993/2005... and here is the precip map. Here is 2019... Plenty of similarities on the analog composites. 2019 has surface temps in similar areas but warmer. 2019 has AN precip in the nation's heartland but displaced further south and east. Both winters were wildly different but yielded normal to slightly BN temps over the TN Valley for winter. Where they were significantly different was over the northern Plains during the following winters. I didn't include that composite of the two analogs because they are so different that the composite map actually does a misrepresents the two winters. 05-06 is wildly warm over the Norther Plains and 93-94 is cold...almost opposites in those areas. That said, again, the SE is normal/cool during both. addendum: One can also not on the SST maps that the overall look of the 2019 Pacific map is warmer and is washing out the gradient in the northern hemisphere and might render moot the downstream ENSO implications over NA. Reference to Isotherm and TyphoonTip again.

Good stuff, Jax. IDK about the JAMSTEC. That is another big change in continuity for it. I generally like that model, but it struggled last winter as did the Euro Weeklies. If I had to bet, I think the regions closer to SA will be slightly BN in terms of SST and the regions to the West will be slightly AN. That seems to be a commonality at least for Fall on modeling. So, what I can't decide is whether that has a Modoki look or if it is a week Nina. I am beginning to subscribe to the idea that Robert from WxSouth is floating, and that is that typical ENSO patterns are not producing correlating results in relation to past analogs. I think the gradient will be the issue now in terms of SST(giving a nod to TyphoonTip). Pretty much the entire Pac basin is atypically warm. Now, Isotherm just posted(maybe on the main board now) about how the over-amped Pac may likely produce a very active Pacific jet. We saw that last winter as it just hammered the northern Rockies. I have never seen so much snow in my life(visited in late March last year)....they still had snow up to the second floors of their buildings on April 1st in West Yellowstone, MT. So, I wonder if we see another year with a very active Pacific jet. What I don't know is how the cooler water near SA is going to impact that fire hose. Does it buckle the jet(if so, where?) or does it just allow a zonal flow as this winter's norm? Also the warmer temps in the GOA are going to have to be reckoned with. Even if analogs could be used, seems like very few match the warm basin look along with the very warm water in the GOA. I have seen 93-94 kicked around and maybe 14-15...but do those analogs even work as there is very little gradient in the Pacific right now. I still think the mean trough is east of the Rockies(maybe up against the foothills on its westward extent) and is west of the Apps(maybe barely). I also think this winter is going to be similar to 17-18 in that it has extremes that tend to flip back and forth during winter. Hey, and great thread as always. Thanks for sharing those maps. Definitely not a boring ENSO look as it is sort of wild looking. I suspect we are in new territory right now in terms of the ENSO. This is when I would like to have an atmospheric physics degree(without having to put in all of that work to get it...LOL).

Ventrice on Twitter is saying there is an issue with the CANSIPS August run...they are working on a fix per the MA sub-forum.

LOL. Yeah, I probably should have looked at that a bit more closely.

Good find. Interesting that it has an Nina for an SST and a trough in the East at 500. Weak La Nina's are not always bad in my neck of the woods. Strong Nina's are pretty much terrible. The weak ones produce some serious extremes in temps. About the only thing that limits snow amounts are years when weak La Ninas produce long spells of precip-less weeks. I do wonder if the atmosphere will experiences a very mild hangover from the El Nino early during the winter and then(Niña...edit) lock-in during late winter. The warm water near the GOA/NE PAC should cause an interesting PDO index. As mentioned in the pattern discussion thread, this year may not have a ton of analogs. Does the Cansips work with an analog package at that range? Interestingly, the Cansips has a fairly warm bias IMHO. So, that is an interesting 500 look. It would be pretty wild if the West gets a perfect setup and the cold goes East...would balance out last year where they got a ton of snow during a perfect set-up for the East.

Again, I would encourage everyone to find the comments (I think it was TyphoonTip) regarding gradient, El Nino, and this past winter. Short story...the Pacific basin as a whole was warmer than normal during this past winter. The El Nino was weak. That created very little gradient, and the atmosphere had some La Nada/Nina characteristics. There needs to be a somewhat sharper ocean temp differential between the Nino area and the rest of the basin. Add in the active MJO(strong Nina characteristic), there is room for plenty of discussion regarding both this past and upcoming winter. Jax, am I reading correctly that the JAMSTEC is slightly south of neutral? Interesting early look there. Have you seen any other LR thoughts on ENSO for next winter? Jax already knows this, but for the new folks....ENSO can be really fickle at this range regarding next winter. We might get some hints with its summer state, but ENSO models aren't super accurate until November when looking at winter. Still, it is nice to look at LR modeling and is the only way to get better. Thanks for the share, Jax. If this next winter is similar to this past one...going to be plenty of surprises(not sure good or bad)!

Thanks for the share. Great information. Please keep us updated.

Looks like the rainy pattern continues....If this winter has shown us anything, we need to question things if a "dry spell" shows up in modeling. Not sure that we get the massive amounts from last weekend, but still appears to be a steady dose for the next couple of weeks at least. Honestly, when I start to squirm would be if we somehow manage to tap a tropical feed from a tropical storm or hurricane early in the tropical season. Hopefully, we get enough time(before early summer) to allow the water management agencies to get our reservoirs down enough to withstand another healthy round of rain. Very early in the season to have this much water. I feel certain some folks are working long but productive hours to keep tabs on this. They have done a really good, commendable job so far. Just need to buy some time so that we can maintain a bit of wiggle room.

MRX with a great write-up about the event as it relates to E TN.... https://www.weather.gov/mrx/hydroevent?platform=hootsuite

Byron Begley of Little River Outfitters writes a fantastic fly fishing blog for GSMNP. He also does a great job in talking about river flows. Here is a link to his discussion about where river levels are currently compared to historical averages in the Smokies. He also notes which roads(and why) certain roads are closed in the Park. This article was written this morning. Also, check out that 1994 flood stage for Little River in 1994. I remember that one. Just incredible. They had to rebuild the road from the Y to Elkmont. Reinforcement boulders the size of vans were washed away that year. https://littleriveroutfitters.com/pages/fishing/report.htm

Thanks, Holston. Radarscope showing heavy rain southwest of Knoxville.

Anyone have a nice, hi-def rainfall map(won't include future amounts over E TN) for the past seven days to the present for the forum area?

I watch the levels for Little River and the Doe during spring so as to know when to safely fish(wade) those early season hatches at either Roan Mountain State Park or in GSMNP. Two things...it will take some time for that to settle back to median flow with no rain at all(likely a couple of weeks). The other, it won't take much rainfall at all in order to bump that right back up to flood stage. One time I fished the Doe and the graph looked good when I left the house, but there had been some showers on the mountain a few hours earlier. I noticed an uptick similar to the Feb 11th one where it spiked up and looked like it was coming back down....just that little downward hitch on that blue line above as it soars upward. Well, I though it was coming back down and had peaked. So, we hopped in the car and headed for the state park. Nope. It was a torrent. We tried throwing some streamers, but it was just too much. Got home and the graph was rolling. For that entire spring, the river was very susceptible to any rain. Great share, Tellico. Great illustration of a river "stepping up" over time.