That’s true, we got unlucky with the pattern in December, and March is to be decided but the confluence being too strong for wave 1 and too weak for wave 2 is just rotten luck. However, we also had a shitty longwave pattern in the heart of winter, it feels like we had a bad pattern overall and the bad luck we got took us from below average to rat. Ray has some good information on his blog about enso structure, and he mentioned that the 2 worst enso state+structure combinations we can get are an East based nino and a modoki (west based) Nina. These effects are amplified when the enso event is stronger and well coupled. A moderate or stronger modoki Nina is bad news if you are looking for cold and snow in the east. We basically had the same enso configuration as 2011-2012.