raindancewx

The time from the solar min to the solar peak actually looks pretty consistent with the rule posted above. The cycle min was the year ending February 2019, at 2/sunspots per month, and the cycle peak looks like it will be the year ending November 2023, so that's 4 years and 8 months, for a 123 sunspot/month peak, v. 5 years for 116/month in the chart above.

I'm increasingly open to the idea that we're actually passing the solar peak for this cycle. If you look at the data, we hit ~122 sunspots/month for the year ending September 2023. That's up from ~2 sunspots/month for the year ending Feb 2019. Oct & Nov 2023 both look like they could finish at 115 or less. We've not had two months in a row that low in a year or so. But they'll both beat Oct/Nov of 2022. But is December going to bounce back to over 110 after a few months below? Is January going to bounce back to 150 or something? I have my doubts. 2022 09 2022.705 96.0 16.3 1264 2022 10 2022.790 95.5 16.0 1215 2022 11 2022.873 80.5 16.2 1047 2022 12 2022.958 112.8 16.6 860 2023 01 2023.042 144.4 29.4 968 2023 02 2023.122 111.3 20.7 1014 2023 03 2023.204 123.3 17.9 1081 2023 04 2023.286 97.6 18.0 1132 2023 05 2023.371 137.4 19.6 1240 2023 06 2023.453 160.5 20.0 1248 2023 07 2023.538 159.1 17.3 1039 * 2023 08 2023.623 114.8 15.4 1095 * 2023 09 2023.705 133.6 17.6 1140 * 2023 10 2023.790 99.4 16.0 958 * I mention this because the 'ascending solar favors blocking' thing is likely moot if we're already starting to wind down. The last solar cycle peaked in October 2013-September 2014 at ~117 sunspots/month, so conceptually the timing is feasible. Especially since the cycles since 1762 have been observed to range from 9-13 years. It's not an automatic 11 year cycle. 2013 10 2013.790 114.4 8.2 421 2013 11 2013.874 113.9 8.2 321 2013 12 2013.958 124.2 9.1 402 2014 01 2014.042 117.0 8.2 398 2014 02 2014.123 146.1 10.7 384 2014 03 2014.204 128.7 8.6 493 2014 04 2014.288 112.5 6.9 486 2014 05 2014.371 112.5 7.5 493 2014 06 2014.455 102.9 7.7 469 2014 07 2014.538 100.2 7.4 477 2014 08 2014.623 106.9 7.6 486 2014 09 2014.707 130.0 8.7 419

Same PDO influence as what you'd expect over the past week. Should continue on/off for a while. The subtropical jet has been active though.

We're on the board here for snow. Parts of the city had a dusting to an inch, with 0.3" at the official site. Timing remains pretty close to my analog "snow signal" composite. These were periods when measurable snow showed up in multiple analogs. We had no rain or snow in town from 9/19-11/09, which is unusual in an El Nino. But I had two of the 10 lowest precipitation totals for that period as analogs with 1991 (0.26") and 1951 (0.42"). I've mentioned since 2015 that there is a direct negative correlation between Albuquerque and Philadelphia snow in El Nino. That relationship has been getting stronger with subsequent El Ninos (2015-16, 2018-19, 2019-20).

I'll take it.

Webb's datasets are pretty flawed. You'll see him talk about 30 blends of data washing out errors. At the end of the day though, the ship reports / ICOADS / sparse official observations pre 1950 all have pretty systematic flaws that can't really be teased out well enough to detect the older weak events for El Nino or La Nina. Beyond that you just don't have many SST observations in the older decades south of 50S until pretty recently, and you'd want to be able to look for the "PDO" ring in the Southern Hemisphere as well, as an example of an ENSO response that did or did not happen. Call it what you will, but CPC has the El Nino / -PDO result I've been expecting for months. You have storms showing up on the models undercutting a very warm northern US, with the West turning wet despite the supposed El Nino = +PNA look. For the moment, 2009 is a good analog to the pattern. There are real reasons to believe it won't continue. As we get closer to December, we should start to see the more canonical blazing East / cool West look that shows up with heat in Nino 4 / MJO zones 5 / +WPO years. Here is another correlation map - you can see we're still moving to the -PDO looks.

These measurements are like splitting hairs over the facial features in identical twins. The whole point of these seasonal forecasts is that you're supposed to look at everything, not just different versions of the same thing.

Which do you guys like now? RONI went up, MEI went down for the recent updates. For me, the issue with the MEI is timeliness as much as anything. Takes forever to update. If you map out correlations of Nino 3.4 SSTs, v. the MEI, v. the SOI, they're all basically the same long-term for sensible US weather, at about the same correlation rate. The RONI thing on the other hand is just overkill. CPC already normalizes Nino 3.4 against a running 30-year average in the Pacific. No need to subtract out the other oceans. The Indian is warming faster than the Pacific but not dramatically so. In any given ENSO event you can also have a temporary out of trend blip in the Atlantic or Indian v. the linear tendency in warming. As far as the PDO, the version of it I use is still extremely negative, at -1.7 in October. Link is down at the moment. https://oceanview.pfeg.noaa.gov/erddap/tabledap/cciea_OC_PDO.htmlTable?time,PDO In general, you have a fairly strong winter negative correlation between the +AMO/-PDO. -PDO and warm Atlantic conditions are associated with La Nina. This year we had an active and very warm Atlantic, so it's not really surprising to see the PDO hanging on. https://psl.noaa.gov/data/correlation/table/corr.table_dec.txt

Here is a list of El Ninos with a -WPO look in October. It's actually pretty common even in the stronger El Ninos. But it tends to flip back hard. The November look on the Canadian is relatively canonical for the transitional start to flip back, with a low pressure weakness by Kamchatka, but not quite over it, with that low north of high pressure by SE Asia. You can see how the WPO performed in my analogs at the weightings I used in my outlook below. -WPO El Nino October 1951, 1976, 1986, 1991, 1997, 2002, 2009, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019 Off the top of my head, the +WPO / -EPO / +PNA / -NAO / -AO look for October is probably fairly similar to 1988 and 2003 along with the obvious match of 2009 that you all want.

Looking back, the biggest difference in the El Ninos that are cold in the Southwest v. the Southeast seems to be how persistent the WPO look is. The persistently mixed or negative WPO looks show like this - Persistently positive are more like this - The Canadian has the big area of enhanced sinking air by Japan and south, like the +WPO composite. So I think the second map is more likely. The WPO and EPO have some tendency to move with the PDO, but the WPO seems more tied to the warmth of Nino 4 / the Indonesian warm pool. There just aren't many -WPO years now, with thunderstorms usually enhanced in MJO phases 4-6. The reason I like the Canadian is the precipitation patterns it shows usually match what happens in the MJO zones. So then you can test to see if the rest of it makes sense. The look of MJO 8 usually suppresses the enhanced rain running east just north of the equator in the composite - which we don't see on the modelling.

I enjoyed reading your outlook. PowerPoint style setups really do wonders for flipping through ideas quickly. I used to do what you do, where you take 4-8 factors and see which years have those factors. Then you grab the overall years in the most categories. What I found though is the blend from doing that makes the overall match much worse than the individual years. You really want the blend to match everything - that's what I've found anyway. Like, you could probably blend 1997 and 1954 in the right situation and get the pattern in a weak El Nino if the blend is correctly combined to generate all the important variables.

Also: Nino 3.4 may already be just about done warming. Via CPC - 2023 8 28.21 26.86 1.35 2023 9 28.32 26.72 1.60 2023 10 28.38 26.72 1.66 Ocean heat content has been flat around 1-1.1 in the 100-180W zone. It's now running behind 2018 on that metric. For the moment, it's very similar to 2009. But 2009 had a massive increase in subsurface heat in November that we're not seeing. So that match won't hold. It's enough to avoid a brutally cold November though.

Models have been particularly inept with this event so far. -PDO El Nino blend was not too bad for October. We'll see how long that lasts. Weaknesses in the transient heat showed up more or less where you'd expect. Pattern competition has been showing up. That's a hallmark of the years with PDO/ENSO in opposite phases. Cold snap below is what I was referring to in my outlook from 10/10, the late month Western cold shot. Shows up in the analogs too - 1951, 1972, 1982, 1991, and 2009 as a blend got pretty cold late October in the West. Some of the years have it bleeding East by month end, others wait until November. Showed up about two days two late to make the West colder than the East unfortunately. Canadian has moved DJF tropical precipitation east of the last run. Now looks like a true 6-7 MJO blend, with the positive Indian Ocean Dipole influence north of Madagascar. The 500 mb look seems to feature a lot of +WPO looks. It's hard to get the US real cold when that happens. This is actually pretty close to the look I had in my forecast. March looks ferocious again actually. I'm on board with 1/15-4/15 being pretty snowy in the West and Plains, with occasional monster storms running east as wind + rain or snow on various trajectories. It's a very wet look.

Actually, any predilection by the intelligentsia to engage in the manifestation of prolix exposition through a buzzword disposition form of communication notwithstanding the availability of more comprehensible, punctiliously applicable, diminutive alternatives is enough to impress you Mr. Tip. After all, you are the reigning insufferable blowhard of the forum.

The El Nino / La Nina cycle itself is a cycle. A lot of research suggests that before the mid-1700s, there were hardly any El Ninos. Even in recent periods, you have a nine year gap from the 1930-31 El Nino to the 1939-40 El Nino. I'd be a bit nervous about the winter if I lived in the East though. This is nominally a -NAO, -AO, +PNA month on net, even with the big dips for the PNA at the start and end of the month. It's just much warmer for the East than those patterns imply, likely from the -PDO or the global ocean warmth. We're "supposed to be" warm with the pattern this month in the West. Although we've got some cold and snowy days by Halloween out here. Models still have some snow for me. +PNA, -NAO October...it's like...3-5 warmer in the East than the composite? Even without 2009 it's 1-3 warmer I'd reckon.

I was actually going to mention in the main thread that I see a bit of a signal for a Northeast snowstorm in mid-November. But I'm not really confident in it. It would be during the transition from the warm spell to a cooler spell that should set up after 11/15 or so. The SE ridging is how I think the -PDO aspect will play out as it weakens from super negative to weakly or moderately negative. Often the super -PDO is just a Western trough (1988 as an example), but the weaker ones are SE ridging. That's been my premise for a while.

My winter outlooks (posted on 10/10 this year) utilize harmonics in the analog data for storms locally. The first period for that was 10/29-10/31, which the GFS has been showing as a pretty widespread snowstorm here. Euro has a different look. We'll see. Light snow is not really that rare here in late October. I had 8 or 9 inches in October 2020, which was unusual to say the least. Also mentioned two systems for the SW in late October using the Bering Sea Rule. One was south of Kamchatka on 10/6, that was supposed to show up 17-21 days later (it has, today), and then this coming system was 10/10 south of Kamchatka, and will show up 17-21 days later. One more here in early November, and then we quiet down again. I don't live at sea level, I don't get the luxury of waiting until 12/1 to forecast winter. https://t.co/W8NJDlixXP

I'm pretty convinced that the OLR is screwed up because of the extra moisture / cloudiness around globally from the volcano. I'm 6'3" and my clothes are designed to fit my physique. Imagine if I woke up tomorrow and I was 7'2" and I had to come up with an outfit from my wardrobe. Now imagine that only my legs got longer and the rest of me remained the same. OLR and a lot of the other variables are based on historical averages that are incoherent at the moment. Especially since the +15% extra water vapor globally isn't distributed evenly across all zones. Imagine if the moisture content was distributed like this: NW: X---> 0.85x NE: X-----> 1.50x SW: X --------> 1.15x SE: X-------------> 1.1x That's a 15% net increase from 4x to 4.6x where x is the 30-year water content in each zone.

Here is 2002 & 2009 as a composite for October in the US. I'll keep asking this - if the weather never actually matches what those VP maps show for forcing....who cares where the forcing is? We're getting pretty close to winter. Do you really want to ride years as your main analogs that have not worked all Summer? 2009 is pretty warm in November and I think March could be fairly similar, but it's at best a C- type of match. Oct 25-31 looks fairly cold in the NW and warm in the SE, so we should end up with the pretty traditional October -PDO correlation, where MN to Maine is the warmest spot nationally. The PDO is still going to finish very negative for the month. Nino 1.2 in October tends to lead changes in the PDO in Nov-Apr. So the PDO should be weakening, but it's not a quick process. It moves in fits and starts. The good news is the -PDO has virtually no correlation to US temps in December. As the warmth of Nino 1.2 moves West, the degradation of the -PDO should slow if anything. I expect it get to 0 to -1 by December and then fluctuate in that band until late winter/March when it may re-strengthen or go weakly positive. This El Nino is still only "officially" around +1.3C on Tropical Tidbits. Not even sure anymore that we'll top 1.5C for winter. We're hanging out at 28.1-28.2C on the weeklies after reaching 28.3C for a hot minute in September on the weeklies. CPC uses 26.63C as the DJF baseline...and I'm sure it'll be weakening quite quickly by late winter. I think the raw SST number for Nino 3.4 October may come in below September. 06SEP2023 23.6 2.9 27.0 2.2 28.3 1.6 29.7 1.1 13SEP2023 23.3 2.6 27.1 2.2 28.3 1.6 29.8 1.1 20SEP2023 23.5 2.8 27.0 2.1 28.3 1.7 29.9 1.2 27SEP2023 23.5 2.8 27.0 2.0 28.1 1.5 29.8 1.1 04OCT2023 23.4 2.6 26.8 1.9 28.2 1.5 29.8 1.2 11OCT2023 23.2 2.3 27.1 2.1 28.2 1.5 30.0 1.3 https://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/detrend.nino34.ascii.txt

Just think of El Nino like a person. If you had a person with $3 million for his net worth and $20,000 a year income, would you classify that person as wealthy or poor? Maybe some combination? The wealth for 30 years would safely produce $120,000 in income, so maybe it would be best to think of the guy as a $100,000+ earner? It's the same type of thing with El Nino. You just have to determine what you value in the measurements. Where I live, the SSTs are much more correlated to actual weather than the various indexes in most months. The AO/NAO/PNA/EPO/WPO have almost no relevance for temperature correlations outside of a small mid-Jan to mid-Apr window. Most of the users on here like to use El Nino / La Nina as little more than a proxy for the PNA phase.

CFS has widespread warmth for the US so far for November. I doubt the month will be as warm as it shows. Tropical Tidbits has filtered global SSTs closest to 2006, 2004, and 2015 at the moment. By the way, the Jamstec precipitation outlook shown earlier is very similar to the Canadian. It's very much a phase 6 look with a contribution from the +Indian Ocean Dipole. The wettest conditions are west of the dateline but east of Australia. Very dry West of Indonesia, but also to the East in a small spot. The Jamstec outlook looks like a blend of 6-7-8 for temps on the MJO composites. I could actually see that, if you weighted the looks at 65-25-10 or so.

Old Bering Sea Rule. I'm not that confident in the precip, but cooler weather dumping into the West looks right. Another big low off the Southern tip of Kamchatka ~now. More storms for me in 17-21 days (Nov 3-7). After that, should get quiet for a little while.

Here is a quick look at the most -PDO Nov-Apr years in October and then this year. Looks like a decent match to me for where the month will end. The models have the PNA going negative again later in the month. The most +PDO El Ninos are pretty cold in October in New England, where it is currently warmest relatively. Southeast tends to be warmer too.

Southwest CO is at the southern edge of areas favored by La Ninas, and the northern edge of areas favored by El Nino. The rest of the state tends to do better for snow in Fall/Winter in La Nina, and Winter/Spring in El Nino. The -PDO El Ninos tend to have more patchy precipitation patterns even in the favored areas.

Check out our messed up shadows today from the eclipse. Was really interesting watching the solar radiation measurements today. Most of the state seems to be underperforming forecast highs in light of the eclipse. My cheap imprecise local thermometer showed temperature drops at the house during the eclipse peak.