40/70 Benchmark

I will be surprised if we don't get really rocked later this season. In the meantime, the "persistence" groupies can have a field day. Everything appears on track AFAIC.

When you go from a roaring PAC jet with no cold, to a medium RNA with cold loading west, that is a change.....independent of snowfall in SNE.

All I implied. Enough said.

Yes....it could trend stronger, but I don't see it as being prohibitive. It could work as a favorable cool ENSO paradigm to lead into the better el Nino like stretch.

To me, that just means the cold loads west first and maybe modifies some as it comes east, but its not a death knell. All I want is storms and seasonable temps.

Freudian!

10 Years doing this and you never stop learning.

Reality:

I'll tell you one change I am going to making next year is to stop using the fall sensible weather match seasons to formulate the winter monthly composites, as it only works for the DM mean forecast composite. The monthly analogs do a much better job conveying my expectations on a month to month basis, which should be expected. Here is my December analog composite map: VS the DM composite for December

Probably lends itself to variability.

Society gets carried away with CC when we have these runs of shit-winters, which we have always had. We were due for a horrendous decade, like the 50s and 80s...and yes, they are warmer now then they were then....because the globe IS warming.

I'm just quoting what Cohen said. Clearly I don't expect a -3SD NAO and the oceans/hemisphere are much warmer.

"I also included January 2015 that technically did not achieve major warming status, may have actually been an extreme stretched PV event, but does resemble the current event in evolution in the polar stratosphere. But to my eye the event that looks most similar to the current event, at least as predicted by the models, is February 2010 and it has the advantage of being also a moderate to strong El Niño winter". -Cohen Maybe it all goes to shit and winter blows again, but at least I know I'm not crazy.

Like I said, even if we don't meet the technical definition and see a reversal, the PV will be weak. This is the difference between many of those really meager starts amongst warm ENSO events. Hell, maybe we still whiff like last year despite ample blocking, but what I do know is that it won't be due to a record RNA.

Probably as good as anyone else's.

Global warming is absolutely happening. There isn't any debate. Looks like Judah Cohen is still expecting a SSW and subsequent PV split, though he admits its far from a certainty. https://www.aer.com/science-research/climate-weather/arctic-oscillation/ And again, this is not the end all.....you need more to go right to save winter in the east, but it helps.

Of course not, since the entire continent has been devoid of cold due to the raging Pacific jet all month...it takes time cool off Canada again. You don't need to be very cold in January and February to get snow. As far as the SSW, I agree that is debatable.....but even if it technically doesn't happen, the PV should remain weak in the mean as the Pacific gets more favorable later in January and into February.

Again, it doesn't make very much sense to look at lean snowfall starts that featured very little blocking...if you want to point to 2015 and 1957, okay...I can see Boston paralleling those years in terms of snowfall, which would yield a mean of a tick below average for the season. But the others in that data set had a very strong PV.

Kind of akin to an Archambault signal in that it's not the mode that triggers storminess, but rather the modality. Interesting.

Yea, we covered that.

We'll see. I am willing to accept the "L" on December...not awful, but not good.

2009 is also double weighted and it should be apparent why in about a month.

So around +4 to +5. I was a degree or two on the cold side, mainly due to the extent of the black hole over AK....but take notice that I did have 2006 and 2015 double weighted in my forecast composite.