El Nino 2023-2024

[snowman19]

50 minutes ago, bluewave said:

It kind of looks like the WWBs so far west  mostly allow Nino 4 to warm more while all the other regions stagnate or move sideways.
 


 

It appears some healthy warming is imminent:

 

“Do you think this Nino will reach super status?”

 

 

[snowman19]

I can easily see this eclipsing +2.0C in November: Region 3.4:

https://cyclonicwx.com/data/sst/crw_ssta_graph_nino34.png

Region 3 and 1+2:

https://cyclonicwx.com/data/sst/crw_ssta_graph_nino3.png

https://cyclonicwx.com/data/sst/crw_ssta_graph_nino12.png

[40/70 Benchmark]

6 hours ago, bluewave said:

The Euro generally had the 500 mb pattern correct last winter. Notice how the ridge and trough axis longitudes worked out. But it underestimated the depth of the trough in the West. The East was particularly a good forecast indicating that the south based Greenland block would link up with the SE Ridge.

 

I don't think there is any entity, man or machine, that accurately predicted the depth of that western CONUS trough.

[snowman19]

I don't think there is any entity, man or machine, that accurately predicted the depth of that western CONUS trough.

I fully expected February and March to be lost causes last winter, I did not expect the unmitigated December and January disasters though in spite of the healthy 3rd year La Niña however

[40/70 Benchmark]

30 minutes ago, snowman19 said:

I fully expected February and March to be lost causes last winter, I did not expect the unmitigated December and January disasters though in spite of the healthy 3rd year La Niña however

March wasn't a lost cause at all...snowfall totals don't tell the entire story.....there was a HECS like 15 mi to my west.

[brooklynwx99]

17 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

March wasn't a lost cause at all...snowfall totals don't tell the entire story.

super favorable pattern without results for most TWICE that winter… i am confident that if we see blocking of that scale in a Nino, someone on the EC is getting crushed. no worries about a persistent SE ridge this time

[bluewave]

45 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

I don't think there is any entity, man or machine, that accurately predicted the depth of that western CONUS trough.

The warm blob and NPAC ridge was displaced too far west last winter from the 13-14 more optimal position. Once that warm pool and ridge position pulls to the north and Northwest of Hawaii it becomes a problem for us. We need it closer to the West Coast for a better winter experience here.
 

 

 

[40/70 Benchmark]

4 minutes ago, bluewave said:

The warm blob and NPAC ridge was displaced too far west last winter from the 13-14 more optimal position. Once that warm pool and ridge position pulls to the north and Northwest of Hawaii it becomes a problem for us. We need it closer to the West Coast for a better winter experience here.
 

 

 

Yea, probably why we got a west biased PNA in January that acted like an RNA.

[snowman19]

March wasn't a lost cause at all...snowfall totals don't tell the entire story.....there was a HECS like 15 mi to my west.

It was for the NYC metro area…

[Itryatgolf70]

9 minutes ago, bluewave said:

The warm blob and NPAC ridge was displaced too far west last winter from the 13-14 more optimal position. Once that warm pool and ridge position pulls to the north and Northwest of Hawaii it becomes a problem for us. We need it closer to the West Coast for a better winter experience here.
 

 

 

Is it too early to know where it most likely will end up this winter? 

[Eskimo Joe]

Curious to know how one can tell when an El Nino couples with the atmosphere. 

[roardog]

Nino 4 up to +1.5 today. 

[bluewave]

13 minutes ago, roardog said:

Nino 4 up to +1.5 today. 

Getting close to the all-time weekly record of +1.7 set in November 2015. But not sure what the daily record was back then. These WWBs displaced so far west instead of over Nino 3.4 are really putting a west lean on the most anomalous SSTs and forcing. +30C is the real deal.

 

[snowman19]

Curious to know how one can tell when an El Nino couples with the atmosphere. 

It already coupled:

[bluewave]

4 minutes ago, snowman19 said:

It already coupled:

The interaction with the coupled -PDO is what’s  giving us the blended El Niño and La Niña October 500 mb composite. 

[Maestrobjwa]

41 minutes ago, Eskimo Joe said:

Curious to know how one can tell when an El Nino couples with the atmosphere. 

I'd like to know the same.

[Stormchaserchuck1]

You would get consistent PNA conditions. It would connect with the NPH (North Pacific High). 

https://ibb.co/5WXHnNZ

The NOI (northern hemisphere-Darwin) and SOI* (southern hemisphere-Darwin) are good measurements. 

[bluewave]

15 minutes ago, Maestrobjwa said:

I'd like to know the same.

 

58 minutes ago, Eskimo Joe said:

Curious to know how one can tell when an El Nino couples with the atmosphere. 

I like to look at the 500 mb composites. A strong -EPO is a classic El Niño response in October. But the ridge NW of Hawaii is more La Niña or -PDO. So far we are getting a blended composite telling us the El Niño is battling with the -PDO. This is why we are seeing the EPO fluctuations. Most other months of the year the PNA is the prime index that gauges how well El Niño or La Niña are doing. 

 

[Eskimo Joe]

Thanks for the explanation, @bluewave. 

[40/70 Benchmark]

1 hour ago, snowman19 said:

It was for the NYC metro area…

There is always a gradient somewhere with a neg NAO/PNA pattern...the point is it wasn't a "game-over" month for the entire east coast like February. Lumping March together with February is silly.

 

 

 

[bluewave]

4 hours ago, snowman19 said:

Do you think this Nino will reach super status?”

I still think the subsurface looks more like a strong than super for Nino 3.4 in terms of ONI .Thinking the MEI peaks somewhere weak to moderate. Main concern is how strong the -PDO influence will be during winter? Plus we have the polar domain with AO and NAO which is always a wild card.

[griteater]

Aside from looking at recent 500mb patterns, the MEI is another good metric for measuring the ocean and atmosphere coupling associated with ENSO.

The MEI is currently tracking more closely with prior weak/moderate strength El Ninos instead of strong/super El Ninos.

 

Source: MEI.v2: NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory

Key features of composite positive MEI events (warm, El Niño) include (1) anomalously warm SSTs across the east-central equatorial Pacific, (2) anomalously high SLP over Indonesia and the western tropical Pacific and low SLP over the eastern tropical Pacific, (3) reduction or reversal of tropical Pacific easterly winds (trade winds), (4) suppressed tropical convection (positive OLR) over Indonesia and Western Pacific and enhanced convection (negative OLR) over the central Pacific (Fig. 1a). Key features of composite negative MEI events (cold, La Niña, Fig. 1b) are of mostly opposite phase. For any single El Niño or La Niña situation, the atmospheric articulations may depart from this canonical view.

 

Two other sources to consider:

1) The Weekly ENSO update from NOAA has good info on the state of ENSO (comes out every Monday).  Here is one of the images from the most recent report showing the developing pattern of persistent, anomalous upper level divergence (-VP) along the dateline, an enhanced convective signal associated with El Nino.

Source: enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf (noaa.gov)

 

2) And this link shows 200mb jet stream anomalies.  Here we can see over the past couple weeks an enhanced subtropical jet signal emanating from the central tropical Pacific and extending into the southern U.S., an El Nino feature of course.

Source: Climate Prediction Center - Monitoring the Madden-Julian Oscillation: 200 hecto Pascals Global Tropical Wind Anomalies (noaa.gov)

 

 

[GaWx]

2 hours ago, Eskimo Joe said:

Curious to know how one can tell when an El Nino couples with the atmosphere. 

 One very good way is to look at the SOI. You don’t get a 56+ day -SOI streak when not in El Niño:

 

Longest -SOI streaks in days since June 1991:

100: Days 3-102 of 1998

72: Days 195-266 of 1997

66: Days 248-313 of 2015

56: Days 232-287 of 2023 and still going

55: Days 191-245 of 2015

46: Days 268-313 of 1997

46: Days 6-51 of 2010

43: Days 175-217 of 1994

https://data.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/SeasonalClimateOutlook/SouthernOscillationIndex/SOIDataFiles/DailySOI1887-1989Base.txt

 All 8 40+ day streaks since June 1991 have been during El Niño.

[raindancewx]

Check out our messed up shadows today from the eclipse. Was really interesting watching the solar radiation measurements today. Most of the state seems to be underperforming forecast highs in light of the eclipse. My cheap imprecise local thermometer showed temperature drops at the house during the eclipse peak.

[GaWx]

6 hours ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

March wasn't a lost cause at all...snowfall totals don't tell the entire story.....there was a HECS like 15 mi to my west.

 Thanks mainly to a major SSW of 2/16/23 along with a second 10 mb wind reversal/warming 2/27/23 and also considering the typical ~2 weeks it takes for strat weakening to work its way well down into the troposphere, the NAO went from the +1.25 of Jan and +0.92 of Feb to -1.11 of Mar and -0.63 of Apr. That resulted in the SE US during mid Mar the coldest period since January. The main reason there was an even longer than normal lag from SSW to colder E US along with a shorter than average duration of cold was a strong RNA late Feb-Mar, which partially countered the effects of the strong -NAO.

[Itryatgolf70]

1 hour ago, GaWx said:

 Thanks mainly to a major SSW of 2/16/23 along with a second 10 mb wind reversal/warming 2/27/23 along with considering the typical 2 weeks it takes for strat weakening to works it way well down into troposphere, the NAO went from the +1.25 of Jan and +0.92 of Feb to -1.11 of Mar and -0.63 of Apr. That resulted in the SE US during mid Mar the coldest period since January. The main reason there was an even longer than normal lag from SSW to colder E US along with a shorter than average duration of cold was a strong RNA late Feb-Mar, which partially countered the effects of the strong -NAO.

I believe if we get another RNA or great episodes of it this winter, we will be doing alot of can kicking down the road imo.

[Terpeast]

8 hours ago, bluewave said:

It kind of looks like the WWBs so far west  mostly allow Nino 4 to warm more while all the other regions stagnate or move sideways.

 

 

Nino 3 also had a bit of a jump today.

[GaWx]

20 minutes ago, Itryatgolf70 said:

I believe if we get another RNA or great episodes of it this winter, we will be doing alot of can kicking down the road imo.

There are periods of both RNA and PNA during a typical winter. But the combo of it being El Niño instead of La Niña and how much cooler is the WPac N of Australia vs one year ago keeps me confident that a RNA won’t dominate. The last El Niño with a RNA dominating is way back in 1968-9. That means that there have been a whopping 18 El Niños in a row with either a dominant PNA (15 of the 18) or neutral (the other 3 of the 18):

https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/norm.pna.monthly.b5001.current.ascii.table

[Itryatgolf70]

57 minutes ago, GaWx said:

There are periods of both RNA and PNA during a typical winter. But the combo of it being El Niño instead of La Niña and how much cooler is the WPac N of Australia vs one year ago keeps me confident that a RNA won’t dominate. The last El Niño with a RNA dominating is way back in 1968-9. That means that there have been a whopping 18 El Niños in a row with either a dominant PNA (15 of the 18) or neutral (the other 3 of the 18):

https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/norm.pna.monthly.b5001.current.ascii.table

You have to admit that the -pdo being this negative, coupled with a pretty intense el niño is interesting 

[GaWx]

4 minutes ago, Itryatgolf70 said:

You have to admit that the -pdo being this negative, coupled with a pretty intense el niño is interesting 

-It is interesting due to its uniqueness though the PDO will probably rise significantly by winter. 

-These El Niño winters didn’t have a net RNA despite a net -PDO: 2018-9, 2006-7, 2004-5, 1994-5, 1972-3, and 1953-4

-These -PDO El Niño winters did have a RNA dominating: 1968-9, 1965-6, and 1951-2.