40/70 Benchmark

I think that is the one that may have some hope...just an educated guess, though.

Well, certainly ENSO events have always been more and less coupled with the atmosphere, which the MEI attempts to quantify. It was always apparent that this particular cool ENSO event was very well coupled, as opposed to least year's event. I buy into what you are saying to a degree, but you do seem to kind of find a way to attribute everything to the HC. For instance, last year the la nina didn't act like a la nina because the HC nullifies ENSO...but this year, its constructively interfering with ENSO. Just seems a bit nebulous and perhaps overstated to me. Not trying to be a dick...I get that this is a novel concept.

I think the record RNA played a large role, though I'm sure the HC acted as a source of constructive interference for the deconstructive interference lol

Even though they like to troll and bust balls a lot, I think its only fair to give credit to the guys like @qg_omega, @forkyforkand @Torch Tiger this month. I feel like it would be hypocritical not to because at the end of the day, their slew of warm graphics ended up more right than wrong this month. Kudos, and I stand corrected with respect to December. That said, I still feel better times are ahead later this season. We'll see.

If you go on Cosgrove's site, pull up his forecast from last season....it was very good.

Kind of like the inverse of my 2014-2015 season, in which I nailed sensible weather, but misdiagnosed the arctic. Still early, though.

Kind of right for the wrong reason...I don't think he expected the blocking.

That was a great winter....even with the huge February warm spell.

Larry has done very well past couple of years....DT has been awful. Honestly, Cosgrove absolutely nailed last winter.

SBD patterns....silent but deadly assassins.

The worst pattern imaginable is a pattern that isn't ostensibly bad enough to be alarming, but ends up bad.

.....And I think all of us would have taken that. its a catch 22....going into it, you say "hey, the pattern is not awful, we'll have our chances..I'll take it", but if said chances go belly up, you want out and can't get out.

He usually likes or replies to every response on his FB updates...on the last one, I said "seems like the favorable stretch for the NE is getting pushed back", and he never touched it. lol

He has been backing away from the favorable period post holidays in the NE without acknowledging that he's doing so...that aggravates me.

It was always perilous for NYC points southward, but once that RNA got into record territory, SNE was sank, too.....despite blocking. TBH, we probably would have seen more snow without the block. It would have been warmer, but there would have been more storminess owed to less compression.

Well, we don't necessarily need the PV to be decimated to get blocking, either...as we just saw.

Yes. And I wouldn't have been excited either in NYC.

Call it whatever you want, just lay it in front of me and put the fork in my mouth.

I'm pretty confident that there is going to be another ugly period later in January. In a perfect world, we get out of this crap pattern and warm up as things reshuffle over the arctic and the RNA relaxes, but we grab some snow in the transition.

LOL Yea, I would like to start seeing some signs of hope from the stratosphere....needs to happen soon, or else my second half idea may go up in a SBD cloud of smoke.

Agree.

We have just sort of stagnated in this compression induced meteorological purgatory of sort....once something, anything starts to change, that should "stir the pot", so to speak.

Just my hunch, but I have a hard time getting out of this regime without some kind of storminess....you have to figure with two nodes of that magnitude relenting (NAO and RNA) there is going to be: 1) A ton of mass flux 2) Ample supply of cold built up put west.

Yea, I would have never guessed that. I would certainly continue to roll the dice with blocking in a la nina.

Well, the pattern blows....I mean, NNE is salvageable, but nowhere in the east is doing well.