raindancewx

Last year, the La Nina was here in August, and it arguably peaked right around Halloween, before dying off in March/April. Some of the other things I look at favor a pretty warm winter down here (it's actually been several years since we've had a hot winter), but I don't expect the precipitation totals to be as dire as last year or 2017-18 if a late forming La Nina develops. The SOI has magically shot up to near +12 in recent days, so the indicators still lean cold ENSO in some form. April-June all had neutral SOI values for comparison. Will run the figures against the long-term data when July is over.

The +NAO correlation for June to July actually looks a bit like the July 2021 temperature pattern so far. The 1959-60 winter looked like 2020-21 winter at times (Dec & Feb) and then occasionally matched in Spring. July has been decent as a match to 1960 too. I've been watching 1960 because it is a year following the similar weird "very cold Nino 4" + "somewhat negative NAO winter" + "very positive WPO winter" of 1959-60.

From 1950-2020, the Nino 3.4 reading in September has never dropped by more than 1C by the following DJF, despite model predictions last fall of a -1.5 or -2.0 level event in winter (25.0C or colder). June finished at 27.48C in Nino 3.4. So the question is...what is the transition from June to September? July looks like it will be at coldest 27.0C, and even that assumes rapid cooling late month. Last July was 26.99C in Nino 3.4, I'd say the first half of July 2021 is 27.4C or so. August 2020 then fell to 26.26C. That's a pretty cold reading for that early in the year. The subsurface for July so far is still slightly positive. It was already -0.18 last year. I would never really rule out a La Nina at this juncture, but it's either a late bloomer kind of like how 2017 was, or a much weaker one than last year. I still lean Neutral. Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0 30JUN2021 22.6 0.3 26.2 0.0 27.5-0.1 28.8-0.1 07JUL2021 22.2 0.1 26.0-0.0 27.4-0.0 28.9-0.1

The subsurface is still holding on to some warmth. If you look at 2016 or 2017, July is when all the orange and red gets flushed out completely on these images. It hasn't really happened yet. My hunch is we'll see a winter ENSO pattern a bit like one of the years from 1959-1962 for the winter. Those are neutral patterns, but there are blotches of warmth and cold in different months in different spots. Some pretty interesting winters actually. The weird -Nino 4 / ++ WPO / -NAO combo from last year was reminiscent at times of 1959-60. You can see it pretty clearly looking at Dec/Feb in 2020-21 v. 1959-60.

The cold ENSO years starting 2007 with very low sea ice (4.3 million square km or lower mins in Sept) have all been cold somewhere in the West in winter (2007-08, 2011-12, 2012-13, 2016-17. 2020-21) while the higher sea-ice cold ENSO years have not been (2008-09, 2010-11, 2013-14, 2017-18). That's something I'm watching. Certainly worked here last year. Late Summer, July-September is pretty well correlated to how warm Nino 3.4 is in March-May. You would think we'd see a pretty different late Summer pattern from last year. I've actually been sold on a near average or cold August out here for a while for a few reasons - two near record hot Augusts in a row are unlikely to repeat with a third. More generally, this also looks like a more active East Pacific hurricane season than last year to me which can help crush heat in the Southwest in August. Hot La Nina years in the Southwest tend to see late developing heat (90+ readings). So it didn't reach 90 until June here, which is late. But if the sea ice is low, that hasn't failed since 2007 as a "cold somewhere in the West" signal in the low ENSO years. Would be interesting to see those two stats locally go against each other. I'm also starting to wonder if the level of rain by the New Mexico & Texas border the past 60 days is enough to prevent a big high from settling in there for a while. I knew back in Spring May would be a decent month out here just because the November NAO (+) is highly correlated to wet Mays when positive, and so is the January WPO (+) - and both were extremely/record positive. The extreme drought for New Mexico has been been cut in half since 1/1 according to Uncle Sam.

Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 02JUN2021 23.2-0.4 26.6-0.2 27.6-0.2 28.8-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0 30JUN2021 22.6 0.3 26.2 0.0 27.5-0.1 28.8-0.1 June monthly data crossed into positive territory (more El Nino like than La Nina) against the 1951-2010 baseline I like to use for ENSO. Even against the more recent 30-year period, we're solidly Neutral now. We're still tracking fairly similarly to 2012 and 2013 in Nino 3.4 for the year. The June figure is also close to 2016 now.

The attribution science assumes that some link between the Earth warming an extreme event can be found. But...it does it after it happens. To me that's like saying I studied that a big steak filled me up more than two slices of bread. I don't think it has any use. I know I complain about the math, but it's really more the philosophy that bugs me. You can predict after every single unusual weather event than a scientist will say it is Global Warming that contributed to the event. The public doesn't care because the public already knows the scientists will say that. People have no use for knowing that a specific unusual regional weather outcome in the future is linked to the Earth warming if there is no specific timeline for when it will or won't happen. The weather has always been pretty terrible at times, and people have always had to adapt to it, it's just now the adaptations are all toward the warming changes rather than more erratic changes. You can't do anything useful behaviorally from knowing that a rare event was linked to changes in the Earth's temperature. Are people in Portland going to give up their cars? You might think they'd buy air conditioning, but you had a pretty big heat wave in the Northwest in July 2009 and even that didn't happen to a large extent, and it's not like the population stopped growing out there in the 1800s when they had prior less intense heat waves before cooling systems and things like cold bottled water were available. I don't see the point of any of it. If you're talking about something like water in the West, most of the states have had 10 to 100x increased population compared to 100 or 200 years ago, so even in a colder or wetter climate you'd have water and other resource shortages with poor planning. You would have had to divert water resources anyway out here just from the order of magnitude in the population growth (New Mexico went from 327,000 in 1910 around statehood to 2,100,000 now as an example, and even in the 1800s Mark Twain was noting the rivers rain dry, and most of the West has seen far faster growth). https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affects-extreme-weather-around-the-world

Euro keeps missing the boat on the Nino 4 readings. Whole plume should shift warmer though.

I wasn't trying to argue that the specific +40 or +50 readings are not super rare. I think those are flukish and not normally distributed at all. In fact, I ran some of the figures for the NW and Canada in sites with 100+ years of records and they don't really pass some of the normality tests depending on what you're looking for. I can tell you locally, precipitation and snow are the same way, unless filtered by ENSO. So I'm not a big fan of that premise. My focus was more on the general +30 and +35 zone. I think with enough +30 events, you have to look at it as inevitable that some spot somewhere would greatly exceed the general trend. My math was my daily estimate for +35 odds, not +40 or +50. I do think it's well under 1 in 200,000 for a spot to hit +30 in a given day. It's not really that rare in the way we perceive time with so many days. My assumption here is if the high was as strong, but 15 miles displaced in a parallel universe Earth but the same pattern existed, you'd have different sinking air through the valleys and then the sea breeze would behave differently too. You'd end up with a different collection of records by magnitude and space. That's why it's so dumb to me to attribute the +50 or the +40 to climate change. You should be trying to figure out if this setup exactly or with slightly different positioning is going to happen again, or if next time the high will be as strong, but with a sea breeze allowing Seattle to be 78 while Spokane is 110. Most of the research I see is only about "proving" the Earth is warming to show the science is settled using poorly calculated probabilities, which is dumb, if you believe it is settled as the scientists surely do. I really don't have an issue with the general idea of warming, but the way the science is used in situations is borderline useless, since no one knows if this will happen later again this Summer or in 5,000 years, even if the odds favor it happening more.

I would say to add to this, that each climate region / zone is akin to a slot machine with specific odds for an extremely unlikely event. The odds of a jackpot in the Northwest are apparently much higher in Summer for record heat than where I live in the mountains of the Southwest as an example. How do I know that? In Albuquerque, the all-time record high is 107. The highs reach 72 in mid-April peak at 92 in late June to early August, then fall back to 72 in mid-October. That means you have a six month period, for 1892 to 2020, which is 128 complete years at 183 days per year, when 35 degrees above average is less than 1/23,000+ odds, just going by the observations. That's even including substantial warming in that time frame. That's what I mean when I say the bigger effects are from climates changing climate zone/type. Seattle and Portland are perfectly capable of warming up rapidly by drawing up hot desert air in the Summer that sinks from the East rather than cool Maritime air from the West or cold Arctic air from the North. New Mexico is hot regardless, because whether from the south or east or north or west, the surrounding is hot. NM won't see +35 because in that six month time frame since there is no source region of air hot enough to put 127 degrees at 5,300 feet above sea level in July, or 107 in April or October. The issue with this type of math is that the odds reset each day. It's not 1/23,000+ for Albuquerque to hit +35 for the half year, or 1/10,000 for Portland to do it in the Summer. It's each day. I know some spots hit +50, but the general area was more like +35. Given that we just had multiple days of record readings, all concentrated in the same area, it's pretty obvious that because of the exposure to cold in the Arctic/ very wet Pacific air/ very hot desert air from the Southwest, that the odds of a +35 day in the Northwest in the Summer are actually way better than the <1/23,000 per day floor here. If you split the Earth into 200 pieces, I would bet the average frequency for extremes resemble what I have observed in my lifetime. I am going to be 34 in September. In my lifetime, living in Philadelphia, London, and Albuquerque, I have experienced something like 5-10 days that were more than 30 degrees above or below the long-term average high for the place. Philadelphia had a high of 6 in 1994, that's out by +30. Off the top of my head, I remember some mid 80s pool parties in March 1990 and 1998, a 95 in April 2002, 23 in March 1996 after the very cold winter. That's my guess for most extreme in Philadelphia. It snowed when I was in London in October 2008, but that's not 30 out, despite being part of that record wave (their earliest snow since 1934). In Albuquerque, there was a high of 9 (-42) and then 18 in February 2011, a high of 20 (-33) in February 2021. That's it -seven (ish) days, with a few others right probably pretty close. So based on my random sampling of Earth's climate, I've experienced 7/ ~12,400 days more than 30 degrees above or below the average high, roughly 1/1,800. I'd imagine that's closer to the figure for the extreme heat, with the recognition, that those odds are for each day. That's also why you see the extremes so often. Using my lifetime, it would be: 1 in 1,800 odds for a +/-30 high, every day, run every day for each climate, since each day has a different weather pattern globally. The other simpler issue is if you scan old newspaper and magazine accounts, you do have a lot of accounts of pretty extreme temps even in the 1800s in the Northwest. Some of the records online are free, like the one, others are behind paywalls from things like the NYT. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/march-1887-monthly-weather-review-final.pdfvia: United States of America War Department, Monthly Weather Review for 1882, Washington D.C lists the data below The following are the highest temperatures observed during July 1882 in the United States: Fort Lapwai, Idaho (113° F, 45.0° C) Umatilla, Oregon (105° F, 40.6° C) Alamota, Washington (105° F, 40.6° C) One report says: In August 1889, forest fires raged in California, Idaho, Washington, Michigan, Montana, Oregon and Wyoming in the United States. At Seattle, Washington, for several weeks, this region was clouded by smoke, caused by extensive forest fires in every direction. The entire eastern slope of the Cascade Mountains, from Natchez Pass north to the boundary was in flames. At Helena, Montana, destructive forest fires prevailed during the entire month of August. The fire consumed many million feet of lumber and thousands of acres of timber. Another report says Walla Walla hit 108 degrees in July 1891 as an example (pretty close still to the 114 record that stood from 1961 to a few days ago), with Portland at 102. I'm assuming with the current average July high of 89 or so in Walla, it was probably 85 or 86 back in the day, so just as now, you had +30 Summer days against the background of the climate state. I personally think the idea that the probability curve is what is changing for these events is sort of wrong. The events at the far end of the normal distribution are still very rare, they're just somewhat warmer when they do happen. If you change a spot from averaging 70 degrees to 72 degrees annually, and the physical limit of the spot is +/-35 v. the average, people can adapt to it. The issue would be if you changed from 70 to 72 and also shifted to a different climate zone, and suddenly +40 and -40 events became as routine as the +30 or -30 events against the 72 baseline. That's why that "record heat SW" thread has no real activity. It's great that you're concerned that we had a 600 decameter high. We'll have another one this week, and just like the last one, people here won't even notice.

For the past year, the precipitation patterns locally have behaved much more like older years than recent years. Will be real curious to see if that continues into the rest of Summer and Fall. The most similar years to July-June 2020-21 also produced a wet monsoon. Some of the early things I look at imply a reversion toward a neutral or positive PDO base state by late year too.

I probably come off as an asshole in a lot of these threads, but I am wealthy and I did buy and donate some air conditioning units to some friends who own hardware stores in the Northwest and Canada once this heat wave started to show up in the 5-7 day. I work with par sheets, math and statistics in a casino a lot for my job, including forecasting. So even if the odds for this event are 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 1,000,000 in a natural climate, the truth is I've seen award pays listed at 1 in 350,000 or lower odds happen on back to back pulls. The reason it happens in the casino is probably similar to why it happens in the climate. The odds may be super low for an event to happen, but even a place like SW Canada or the Northwest US is only a small portion of the Earth and so those odds are for each square mile of the Earth for each day of the year. The odds are not 1 in 1,000 for the entire Earth to be +50 on a given day. The odds are for one particular spot on the Earth. So the same thing happens with the games, with 1,000+ machines and several featuring multiple denominations, or multiple play options or multiple games within the game (Poker, Blackjack etc) the real world effect is we've given two $500,000+ awards (from the vendor fortunately, not the tribe) in just the past year, even though the machines are setup to pay that much - correctly - at extremely low odds comparable to the odds you see the scientists throw around.

Subsurface top matches for April-June 2021: Blend Apr May Jun 1987 0.31 0.58 0.37 1987 0.31 0.58 0.37 2004 0.21 0.30 0.04 2011 0.58 0.47 0.39 2014 1.41 0.95 0.27 Mean 0.56 0.58 0.29 2021 0.60 0.65 0.32 June 1987 is a pretty good match to June 2021. Not likely to be a good match in July though. Since the 1979 subsurface observations began, there has never been a June with the subsurface as warm as 2021 that went into a La Nina in winter. Years like 2000 were slightly positive in June, and then went into weak La Ninas though. Solar activity is also rapidly rising now. Monthly sunspot average was 16.2 from July 2020-June 2021. https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ocean/index/heat_content_index.txt Local precipitation patterns are a dead on match over the last year to some famous hurricane patterns for the US. Will be curious how that plays out this year.

I don't really a buy a La Nina this strong. But the trend toward a stronger La Nina is there on the Canadian for winter.

The western part of the tropical pacific is very similar now to 2013. Eastern areas? Not really. Not yet anyway. 05JUN2013 22.0-1.5 25.9-0.9 27.5-0.4 28.8-0.2 12JUN2013 21.9-1.2 25.9-0.7 27.5-0.3 28.8-0.2 19JUN2013 21.1-1.7 25.7-0.8 27.3-0.4 28.6-0.4 26JUN2013 20.5-2.0 25.6-0.7 27.4-0.2 28.8-0.2 02JUN2021 23.2-0.4 26.6-0.2 27.6-0.2 28.8-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0

The Omega Block giveth and it taketh away. Looks like the high was 66 here. That's the coldest high on record, tied with 7/15/1968 for the 1892-2021 period centered on 7/1, i.e. 6/16-7/15. Edit: 67 for a hot minute. Still very close to all-time record cold. Coldest high since 1997 for a June day.

The stuff in the Northwest is more impressive than any heat wave in the Southwest during the Summer. Phoenix had some record highs this June, but daily records. Not state or all time or anything like that. We have less physical capacity for highs to run above averages down here, so you end up with a lot of years when a few days end up relatively near the 122 all-time record in Phoenix. Hitting 110+ in Canada or the Northwest is way more impressive when you have less bunching and it takes everything going right (wrong) for a record to be broken so easily despite being 20-40 above average. I can say for Albuquerque, the all-time record high is 107 degrees. So from mid-April to mid-October, that means in 90 years of records it's never 35 above average for at least six months of the year, like some places in the Northwest were. The 107 is around 15 above average.

Salem, Oregon. Keep in mind, Phoenix also had ~14% humidity when it was also 117 on the 18th.

First of all, I'm probably younger than you. Second of all, you never gave a solution for states like where I live where those mean old oil companies are literally paying for my infrastructure, or at least 45% of it. Do you have a way for the state to make up those revenues, or just some empty rhetoric? I'm trying to tell you that the type of taxation that would meaningfully make a difference for emissions would leave people worse off meaningfully. Nothing is free. The Democrats have had almost complete control of the state law making bodies and executive branch since statehood, if they had the slightest interest in changing policy, presumably they would have by now. This may shock you, but knowing about science doesn't make you a good economist or a good city planner. It doesn't even make you a good advocate for science really, since that involves communication. Politicians aren't the planners of society. The world is the culmination of hundreds of billions of decisions. My point is merely that the gist of these threads is that because scientists in the field are very concerned about Climate Change, but people like the book author, you know actual scientists, are not, it strikes me as insane to say "We should only listen to Climate Scientists on the Climate. Only they are experts. Oh, but they aren't experts in any of these adjacent fields like ethics, economics, international relations, but obviously we should still unquestionably accept their input unflinchingly". That's your position from the gist of your post. https://www.abqjournal.com/2403026/nm-oil-output-at-record-levels-after-crash.html Despite attempts to diversify New Mexico’s economy, the state currently gets nearly 45% of its total revenue – or more than $4 billion annually – from taxes and royalties on the oil and natural gas industries.

Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 26MAY2021 23.4-0.5 26.7-0.3 27.6-0.3 28.8-0.1 02JUN2021 23.2-0.4 26.6-0.2 27.6-0.2 28.8-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0 About as neutral as you'll ever see this week. Subsurface is still slightly warm. Currently in Omega Block bliss here, with temperatures not topping the low 70s, rain, and no 90 degree readings in the forecast.

It's still kind of funny to me that this heat wave, which has a chance at setting all time (national and state) heat records is being compared to the heat down here earlier in the month. I think I had one record daily high in June on 6/14? I've got two potential all-time record low highs coming in the next four days. 120 in Phoenix is just very different from 110 in Portland Oregon. When you get the 600 decameter monsters down here, a lot of times they under-perform because any moisture in the air is destroyed, and you end up with a 67/102 day instead of a 75/105 day. In the Northwest you have actual oceans and bodies of water nearby to really juice the lows and allow for some nasty air-masses. When the map below happened last year, the lows were still around 70 each day, even with a ~2 degree urban heat island effect in Albuquerque for the lows on top of the 1.8F degree warming/century that is present in all other sites in NM. I can't even imagine a 112 degree day, +35F v. average, with a dew point in the 50s-60s all day like Portland had today, you just never have that oppressive stuff here. 104 with a dew point of 66 at 1pm is the type of the thing that would easily kill people not used to it. https://forecast.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KPDX.html

The look on the CFS for July has been fairly consistent with the big positive March WPO correlation to July for a while now. Not to mention the May -NAO correlation to July.

The big hints for next winter at this juncture are the periodic record WPO values, the first (net) -NAO winter in forever, and then how cold Nino 4 was in winter. Winters after negative NAO winters tend to be cold in the eastern 2/3 of the US, but signal is weak, with a Great Basin warm signal: Winters after a cold Nino 4 winter tend to be cold Southwest, WA, CA, warm east coast and south. Again, signal is weak. Winters after a very positive WPO winter tend to be warm eastern 1/3 of the US and Montana. Not a whole lot of -NAO, +WPO, very cold Nino 4 winter combinations either to get the transition to the 2021-22 winter. DJF WPO NAO Nino4 2020 1.40 -0.42 27.32 2008 0.91 -0.08 27.48 2000 0.44 0.04 27.46 1959 0.38 -0.91 27.70 1952 0.28 -0.20 27.93 2007 0.43 0.65 26.97 July 2009 had the prior hottest day in Seattle at 103 late month. So it's interesting to see that year pop up when the subsurface has been similar. 1959 0.38 -0.91 27.70 1959 0.38 -0.91 27.70 2008 0.91 -0.08 27.48 2007 0.43 0.65 26.97 Mean 0.52 -0.31 27.46 2020 1.4 -0.42 27.32 I actually had mentioned 1959-60 as a "C-tier analog" in the back of my outlook last Fall for the winter because I thought it would be an OK temperature match at times. It was an excellent match in December and then pretty decent in February, despite being a lousy January match. The weird years following the WPO/NAO/Nino 4 would be 1960, 1960, 2008, 2009. That blend has a spatial look somewhat resembling the first two correlation maps. But obviously it's too early for a real guess as to what winter will do. But I do think some years following the strong +WPO, -NAO, very cold Nino 4 combo will end up working for next winter, just because the three things individually (record +WPO winter, ~very cold Nino 4, most -NAO winter in ages) are rare enough even individually.

I've been impressed with the semi-constant 47-day cycle repeat since roughly last Fall in the US temperature profile. It's not exactly the same of course. Much more extreme and the cold and hot sources are in slightly different places. But the timing does line up and the look is similar when adjusting for the season. I've always figured part of the reason some heat waves and cold snaps are extreme now is that we are starting to get Spring/Fall type anomalies (+/- 20-40, instead of 10-20) in the shoulder/transitional months of Winter/Summer, when it used to be much harder for that to happen. I've had very warm highs transition to very cold highs transition at the same part of these 47 day cycles since September when near record heat (96) went to near record cold (47) in two days or so. Same thing in October. Current transition from low or mid-90s to low or mid 70s on Sunday or Monday is kind of the June version of it. Low or mid 70s would be near cold highs here for the time of year after hitting 103 earlier in the month, which is relatively close to record warmth (107 in June 1994).

I was looking the other day. Since the last big heat wave in the Northwest, Seattle has gone from 30% to 40% or so of homes with air conditioning. You can compare that to 86% of homes in Phoenix with air conditioning. That's why I actually think you may see some deaths from the heat in the Northwest in the coming days. One nice trade off for the synoptic changes happening now is the heat wave is over here, and we're getting a lot of rain the next few days. Any day with a high under 80 is a victory this close to the solstice here. I'll probably head up to one of the mountain towns to experience some early Summer 60s-low 70s.