40/70 Benchmark

Agreed.

Kudos to you super-attentive types......I just can't get up for the resultant thermal nuances of every whale queef over the equatorial Pacific in June. October, I'm all in.

We are due for wintery December, too. December 1997 kind of did that, too....there was a huge snow event over interior SNE just before xmas. That could be due to wave lengths shortening. too...sometimes you can get away with a forcing regime on the book ends that is awful mid-winter.

Its tough to bet against a raindance composite comprised of 2 of the worst east coast winters minus a good one (he has been exemplary the past few years), but it would be insane for me to see a sixth consecutive well below average snowfall year. Something is going to give.

That is probably the most likely outcome....the warm period will likely be more protracted and anomalous than the cold period, but no one will care if we get PD III.

I agree....I'm just saying that theoretically speaking, an ONI in that range is still plenty strong enough to mean a warm winter...IOW, I am not rejecting the super el nino idea out of bias for my winter binky.

1.5-2.0 ONI is plenty high enough to cancel winter, too, given the right circumstances.

Its going to be 2.0 or under....we went through the same thing with all of the "Oh no, Godzilla-la nina is coming" tweets...it ended up with a 1.0 ONI peak....people always get carried away with ENSO. I know you never explicitly supported that, but it feeds into the frenzy. 1.5-2.0 ONI is healthy enough, but the 3.0 talk is patently absurd.

I have inferred from this article that the west Pacific warm pool is probably why this el nino isn't going to remain east-based, which is congruent with what others have been saying about the forcing getting pulled west.. "In the present work, consideration of the onset and evolution of El Niño events (Figs. 1 and 2) has led to the innovative classification of El Niño diversity, and uncovered an El Niño onset regime change from an EP origin to a western Pacific origin in the late 1970s (Fig. 3). The onset changes and more frequent occurrence of the extreme events in the past 4 decades arise from a background warming in the equatorial WP and the associated enhanced zonal SST gradients in the equatorial CP" "the change of El Niño in the late 1970s coincides with a rapid warming in the Indo-Pacific warm pool, suggesting that the recent rapid global warming may have had an impact on the observed El Niño changes."

This is consistent with the EMI (El Nino Modoki Index) forecast from Jamstec, which has the el nino steadily translating westward as we approach the cold season. A slightly weaker version of 2015-2016 seems a decent bet.

I agree.

Its fair to wonder whether a peak ONI of near 2 would be a deal breaker given that we have been seeing modest el nino events fail to couple. I'll have a blog coming up on the Relative ONI this summer.

I wonder if its an early peak to hurricane season in the atl basin.

Stay safe.

You've set snowman off for days lol

#triggered

December 1981 had a very large event in eastern NE...March 1984, as well. January 1987 was a huge month.

Even during that stretch, we had some years like 1986-1987 and 1981-1982....even 1982-1983 was decent. Bottom line is I have had five consecutive shitty seasons, which is unprecedented.

The strong el nino/high solar years are pretty split....1940, 1957 and 2002 were good, but 1972, 1982 and 1991, not so much.....looks like there were only two with a notable dearth of big east coast storms....1972 and 1991.

This is largely why it looks like that IMO...you can see that el nino has already shifted a good bit west by November.

Its been frighteningly consistent.

It honestly reminds me the most of 2010.