40/70 Benchmark

I could live with that....it doesn't need to be 20" to 5" like 12/92.....I can deal with "10-3"....I've come a long way in my willingness to share the wealth.

That is the type of pattern where a system can pop at day 2 or 3....regardless of rain vs snow.

Visibility 1/10 of a mile in blowing indifference.

Must be a troll job...I know he can't be that clueless.

I'll be praying for the summit of Deer Scrotum a few miles over yonder from Berkshire park.

That is correctable.

I have yet to see a flake, aside from some the ones I'll observe on Saturday.

Oh, okay...you originally had from 1.97 to 1.98. NP.

No we aren't....designations are obtained via ONI.

Okay, sure. I agree....there is a reason why even Modoki el Nino events are often fairly mild in December. All I am saying is that I do not foresee prohibitive warmth for the month of December in the aggregate.

It just snowed over interior SNE last week and ski season is underway. You do have a firm grasp of coastal plane climo, correct? Its still November...

Yea, God bless, chief.

You mean rose?

This makes zero sense. The convective forcing pattern has been fairly similar to years such as 1965, 1986 (also developed late) and 2009, which also had less pronounced Pacific dipoles and the eastern US did just fine in the snowfall department.

Good thing I didn't say that. The atmosphere will respond, sure, just not as much as did in other instances of a 1.9+ ONI....the response will be different.

This pressure/SST dipole that you see in the MEI schematic above is what has retarded the development of this el Nino and epitomizes the disfunction of the warm ENSO paradigm to date. The weaker dipole resulted in less prominent WWB in much the same manner that an east coast storm lacking a strong pressure gradient will have less wind and meager baroclinicity...thus a weaker system. The issue has been alleviated to an extent, but its never going to catch up the the SST anomalies.

I mentioned in my work that since the forcing has been so far west, that phase 6 will be an issue during periods of thawing....2006-2007 also had this issue, but that winter was much different near the pole due to solar considerations.

Introducing the Relative Ocean Nino Index Oldenborgh et al have observed that the crux of the issue is that the traditional Nino 3.4, from which the ONI is derived, "not only describes ENSO but also has a trend due to global warming, which has very different impacts from that of el Nino" (Oldenborgh et al, 2021). The piece goes onto assert that this is problematic because the "spacial pattern of the observed SST trend over the past century does not resemble the ENSO pattern" (Oldenborgh et al, 2021). The suggested solution is to use the Relative Ocean Nino Index (RONI), which is a value derived from the difference of the original index with the contemporaneous tropical mean SST anomalies. According to Oldenborgh et al, subtracting the tropical mean SST anomaly not only removes the trend, but also results in an SST anomaly (RONI) that is of more direct relevance to changes in tropical convection driven by SST anomalies. Removing the trend in order to distinguish between ENSO related warming and climate change attributed background warming is important because tropical convection is more sensitive to the warming of ENSO relative to the rest of the tropics. Thus convection will concentrate in areas that warm the most relative to the tropical mean background warming. This is why the current generally warm Pacific basin is reducing the ability of ENSO to assert itself in the hemisphere to a level commensurate with the current 1.5 ONI value, as reflected by the ASO tri-monthly RONI value of 1.05, which is weak-moderate and somewhat more in line with the current 0.3 MEI value. This explains why el Nino has thus far failed to redistribute the tropical convection denoted by the negative velocity potential away from the central Pacific to the eastern Pacific, co-located with the strongest ENSO anomalies in regions 1.2 and 3, as was the case in 1997 and 2015. In comparison, the ASO RONI values were 2.15 and 1.87, which explains why the tropical forcing was much more co-located with the greatest anomalies to the east. The ocean-atmosphere coupling was much stronger. This is reflected by the AS bi-monthly MEI values of 2.2 and 2.1 as compared to the current value of 0.3. Theoretically speaking, should the el Nino become intense enough and the warmest anomalies remain strongly biased to the east, at some point the convective forcing should realign itself with the strongest positive ENSO anomalies to the east and away from the residual warmest absolute SSTs to the west. The key is what is this critical threshold and will it be reached.

The bi-monthly Multivariate El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index (MEI.v2) is the time series of the leading combined Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) of five different variables (sea level pressure (SLP), sea surface temperature (SST), zonal and meridional components of the surface wind, and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR)) over the tropical Pacific basin (30°S-30°N and 100°E-70°W). The EOFs are calculated for 12 overlapping bi-monthly "seasons" (Dec-Jan, Jan-Feb, Feb-Mar,..., Nov-Dec) in order to take into account ENSO's seasonality, and reduce effects of higher frequency intraseasonal variability. During the typical height of ENSO during late Fall/early Winter, the canonical features of atmosphere and ocean anomalies are shown schematically below based on a composite of 11 historical El Niño and La Niña events. 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. Fig. 1: Schematic diagram showing the physical mechanisms by which the SST (shaded), OLR (contours), surface zonal and meridional winds (vectors), and sea level pressure (represented by "H" and "L" which indicate the high and low pressure center, respectively) determine the wintertime Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) during (a) El Niño and (b) La Niña events. The schematic is based on the composite anomalies for November-December (ND) drawn from 11 warm events and 11 cold events during 1980-2016.

We didn't need the overwhelming canonical response that produced the powerful Pac jet that eviscerated the entire month of December. I'm sorry, I just do not agree with you. We'll see how it plays out...I am not concerned about the winter being dominated by Maritime forcing.....during thaw periods, I can see some phase 6...sure.

The other caveat being that this el Nino isn't half as coupled with the atmosphere as that one was. People need to stop comparing this to the most intense el Nino events in history because this is orders of magnitude less expressed in the hemisphere, regardless of the SST anomalies.

Greenline is down, I think.

Eh, we're all getting old.

Yea, just about time....firing up my model perscriptions.