40/70 Benchmark

Even they must be bored to tears and checked of after these past several months....most boring year in weather history around here.

I still below 1/2" on the month.....its like a continuation of the winter pattern.

Just .22" IMBY yesterday....Stein lives.

What is obnoxious if the recent flip in climo periods....I like how the temp and precip maps give you the option on which climo period you use....I like using the large 1951-2010 option because it provides an expansive and consistent baseline. But the H5 plots have all shifted to 1991-2020 and there is no option to change it. I hate that.

Yea, agree RE December.....but we'll see.

Yes, but still a central player....I think it was always a fool's errand to focus efforts on any single predictor, anyway. Nothing operates in a vacuum.

2010-2011 was a great ENSO analog last year, but this year, not so much. I agree NAO will average positive overall.

Complete agreement. Also, just starting to look in depth....this is a basin wide event with a westward lean...I would group this in the hybrid-basin wide bin and given the state of the subsurface, I do not see this going full tilt modoki.

Keep in mind that the majority of the easterly winds being west of 150W is primarily going to warm the western zones, since the subsurface is warm out there......its really just a narrow sliver within 3.4, right around 130-155W that we have the nexus of easterly winds and cool subsurface.

Blue is easterly on that map, correct?

Its still early and I reserve the right to change my mind between now and issuance in early Novie, but right now I would say anywhere from -0.9 to -1.1, like last season, but a much faster demise.

I am going to write up why I feel we are seeing this disparity amongst guidance because I think that there is a reason that dynamical guidance is weaker.

Most of the subsurface cool anomalies are located under the eastern regions, which is actually pretty warm right now.

I agree. I'm not saying that I would rip and read its forecast, but I wouldn't entirely discount it, either.....I would blend it with some of the other guidance. Its not alone in doing this....its just the most extreme. Check out the difference between the dynamical guidance and statistical guidance....I think that is illuminating.

The potential implication would be a season that deviates from your prototypical "la nina" winter.

I also think a lot of folks are overestimating ENSO this season....this thing is going to begin going in the other direction sooner than consensus IMHO.

Anyone else notice how lackluster the ECMWF is with la nina, and how quickly it models its demise this winter? Has it at peak now, and weakens it to cool-neutral territory by December. It makes sense to me given what I read regarding the lack of connection between the IOD and late developing, or year long stagnant ENSO events.

I'm not saying we are going to have a favorable Pacific from 12/1 to 3/31, but I think we will have some periods of PNA....like we did last season from January through March.

Wife and kids will be in Uganda for another month, I'll ask them to send some serviceable waves along the train haha. Wow, had it been quiet...

My early feelings are it will be relatively potent, but probably more of a modoki. I think the problem that plagues seasonal forecasts that incorporate ENSO is that they tend to generalize, and ENSO events can have pretty drastically different impacts around the hemisphere due to not only differences in strength, but the location of where the anomalies are focused.

Its a defense mechanism.

Nice...good luck.

You maybe right...I haven't done the work with the el nino dataset yet. There is some subjectivity involved...what I did with la nina is I took a binned data set from a peer reviewed paper and then made some adjustments to the data myself. I consider modoki events ones in which the anomalies are centered well to the west, near the dateline, with either neutral or very weak anomalies to the east of 150 degrees longitude, over the eastern regions of 3 and 1.2. I then have a basin-wide/central pacific group, which I refer to in my work as "Hybrid" events, which are centered around approximately 150 longitude, but usually have el nino (la nina) anomalies throughout the basin. Finally, the east based events are entered to the east of 150* longitude, over regions 3 and 1.2, and have either marginal or no el nino (la nina) anomalies west of 150W. Its tedious, but if you look at the DM SSTs from every year, you can get a good sense of where to group each season. Its helpful if you scale the SST anomalies down to 0.5 degree increments to really get a better sense of where the event was focused, as the coarser increments can be more difficult to discern, especially with respect to the weaker events.

I need to go through the el nino events since 1950 and bin them by modoki level, like I have for la nina....probably this spring while in Africa. But I noticed that you have 2009-2010 as central Pacific el nino; I distinctly remember that as being modoki....2002-2003, too.....1986-1987 was probably basin wide with a westward lean.