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Nice couple of hours of rain down here. Still a bit of drizzle. Grass/weeds are happy.

Hopefully some real rain this weekend

It's a more neutral north Pacific response, which means other hemispheric players are more influential. In 2023, the most prominent players were a raging +WPO/+NAO/-PDO. This is why I said that the NAO and the state of the extra tropical Pacific will be so crucial this year. I think that fact that 2023 resembled 1997 was largely due to the extreme +WPO both seasons. Dec 1997 actually had some blocking, hence the major SNE snow right before xmas. 1982 was -WPO....my guess is we end up with a better extra tropical patten than 2023.

Ray and Chris, If Nino 3.4 is at +2C vs 1991-2020 and surrounding tropics are also at +2C vs 1991-2020, there’s no warm El Niño tongue to do its forcing. Thus, it’s essentially neutral rather than super El Niño and officially is neutral for RONI. So, RONI is a better measure for strength of El Niño and La Niña for that matter. Do y’all agree? @bluewave

Think of the information that be gleaned from ENSO concerning the hemispheric response as a continuum of sorts...of both strength AND type. Climate change is exacerbating the perils of a reductive analysis that considers merely strength of ENSO because the fact of the matter is that the hemispheric response is becoming more nuanced and varied.

Not sure of the year but remember it. Looking at my records, my last freeze in 2016 was on 4/21. In 2020 the last freeze was 5/14 and it was on 5/15 in 2023, maybe one of those years?

Simply knowing the strength isn't very helpful if you don't know what the response will be....quite the contrary, it can actually be misleading to a forecaster, which is the trap that I fell into in 2023.

Yea......look at the absolute value of each to obtain a general idea of how strong the event is, but more importantly, it's the relationship between the RONI and ONI that is indicative of the type of response that ENSO may induce around the hemisphere. The latter is what we really need to understand because knowing how strong said response will be is pretty useless if we have no idea what the response will be. I suspect we are going to need the RONI to be at least equivalent or greater than the ONI to avoid yet another muted Aleutian low/se trough couple response. If we have a very strong El Nino with a lagging ONI, as was the case in 2023, then you get a very strong RIDGING response over se Canada and an Aleutian low/se trough that is still meager.

Not as deep. Those will forever remain with more expected next winter.

I agree to a point, but it seems likely we will get multiple opportunities over the next two weeks. Sometimes a few .5" rainfalls is better than one big 2" rainfall for busting drought. Hopefully we can stop the bleeding anyway

You can actually see the thermal processing of the lower levels on the 06z UKMET for Friday rather nicely... This lobe of modestly warmed 850 mb layout bulbing up over SNE around 21z is definitely because of the sun + compressed d-slope working it over. This is one of those 60 day dandies Brian was mentioning yesterday. I also recall mentioning a couple three days ago that the pattern didn't really look crushingly negative to me - more like neutral with an offsetting lean. It's just hard to get us BN frankly, unless we have more direct feeds of perpetual inject into the region - hint hint, which we did this last winter

Are the scars as deep as the ones you have from a series of failed winters?

More like the whole state.TN leads leads the nation with 46% being nocturnal tornadoes

This air mass is both colder than normal, but also... rather prone to machine/automation busts. It's just because the sun is by now seasonally hugely potent, and growing. I was just looking at Friday... that's a general light WNW to NW down slope compression look under an 850mb -2 or -3. Jeez, I've seen it be almost 60 F over a snow pack in mid February due to full sun under 0C 850s. So, although-2 or -3 is a bit of a neg anom, the surface results can be offset quite a bit when compression from air down sloping happens under all that solar power dumping into the environment. Wouldn't shock me to see those MEX numbers verify too cool

Yeah, could be related. Same for the El Nino trough in the East which was much weaker in 2015-2016 and 2023-2024. I also think the much warmer adjacent off equator and subtropical oceans could be warping the response also. Those subtropical seas were so much warmer this winter that the weak La Niña ridge in the Southwest was so much stronger than the 1995-1996 weak La Niña response. It’s a bit challenging to give a specific value to just how much each individual marine heatwave is contributing. I have also been noticing discussions already taking place about the new RONI index. I went back and reread the paper on RONI and seems like most of the value was with La Ninas where the off equator warmth was masking the La Niña response. But when it comes to the strongest El Niños they can appear weaker than the past ONI. But as we saw from 2023-2024, the weaker RONI didn’t correspond to a weaker ridge over Canada and the Northern Tier and any less warmth. Plus the global temperature jump was even more impressive than past even stronger ONI higher end El Niños. But we could make an argument that the weaker RONI and warmer off equator to subtropical SST warmth could have weakened the Aleutian trough and the trough in the East under the big ridge. This could also warp the rainfall response in some way than we normally get with such strong El niños related to the Southern Stream response. This is why we should probably still use the traditional ONI for the actual El Niño intensity and incorporate the RONI for the finer details like how the Aleutian Low and other troughs are responding.

Downpour here at work right now.

That is one heck of an evolution to kick off May. That is a pretty nasty block and a good looking block too...that's the type of blocking we want to see in Jan/Feb lol.

Not to be a downer and I will certainly take the increased rain chances but the first couple of systems next week are weakening cold fronts that will not result in widespread soaking rain. These have all trended weaker up until the day they move through all winter and spring so my hopes are not high. Any rain is good but I don’t think we see much potential for real relief until the very end of next week.

Not to be contrarian or argumentative but ... that just looks like background CC ( or expectation thereof ) to me. Remember, those products are not trying to equate color with the 'OMG' factor. Ha. Seriously, those are probabilities for occurrence. They don't address magnitude. For ex, if those "warm" regions were to verify +.01 for JJA, that is considered a success in claiming there was 50, 60 ...90% chance for above normal. That's it. Nothing more. I will add that this has been explained a hundred times...yet people still post those CPC outlook graphics like look out! We're red hot! These are probabilities... probabilities... probabilities..., for above normal at all... at all... at all...

When I’m on vacation with kids I want good weather. I was in Orlando for Hurricane Erin in 95. That was cool.

This is why we are seeing less of an Aleutian low/se trough response.

DSD on Thursday and good chance to eke out 60 there as well. Thurs to Monday 60 Perfect.

Probably related to the big expansion of the +30C warm pool in the Pacific which is several degrees warmer than we would get back in the old days with the strongest El Niños before the oceans warmed so much.

Currently 38° with light drizzle so that’s fun.