psuhoffman

The Sunday system would be a nice snowstorm if this were a month later.

Actually you couldnt get a better H5 match to the long range GEFS look than early December 2013. DC south didn't do so well (frankly their climo early December is a BIG problem) but everywhere NW of there had a pretty good run with several snow/ice events during that period. Of course everyone won when that look repeated again and again during prime climo.

GEFS goes ape with the epo ridge in early December and floods the whole conus with cold. Enough SE ridge though to suggest the boundary would be close enough for some threats. That kind of a pattern is when some SE ridge isn’t a bad thing. Otherwise it would just be cold and dry.

CMC has a similar idea. Forces the system under the block just slightly too far north for us. Frozen Mason Dixon north. But same idea for that range.

This place is always good for pure entertainment regardless of the weather. I love you guys! Winter is almost here. Snow or not let’s try to enjoy the ride.

Reading certain posts here reminds me of a line from a cheesy 90s movie. “I was trapped near the inner circle of thought”.

You mean we would have almost every December pattern the last 5 years?

It’s been so long people forget how much a great high latitude pattern can mask other flaws.

That is the best and most significant development so far. The high latitudes seem to want to cycle between ok and great so far. Let’s keep that going. The only thing I’m paying attention to long range is how the forecasted puke pattern of the seasonals continues to get pushed back. A week ago we were saying how it continues to be just outside ensemble range. Another week later and it’s still outside realistic guidance range. Let’s keep that going too. Ive been skeptical but I’m about another week from firmly believing that look is just another seasonal guidance mirage.

I predict it will come a day after December 4th.

This is an example of a look that probably won’t work in November but repeat this in winter with a more suppressed jet and broader wavelengths and that block/50/50 combo to our north could bully the mediocre pacific pattern in our favor. It would be difficult for anything to cut in that look mid winter.

The single most encouraging thing I see right now is the tendency for the high latitudes to look generally favorable into early December now. November can be a big head fake month with the volatility of the seasonal changes in the jet going on so while I have generally liked what I have seen the last few weeks, I want to see what happens into December before becoming too confident. That said last year the look up top was already breaking down heading into early December. A crazy EPO ridge kept early December cold and a rogue TPV displacement suppressed a storm south of us...but the signs the AO/NAO weren't going to cooperate were already showing by December. Right now keeping the blocking up top going into December is the single best sign we can have that this winter could be different. Get a more favorable AO/NAO this winter and a lot of those "flaws" that killed us last year won't be as hard to overcome. And those periods when the pacific did cooperate become epic vs just mediocre. One other thought I keep having... better winters tend to tip their hat when even the relaxations and "bad" phases that will happen aren't that bad. USUALLY the better years we avoid month long epic torches. We go through a few days here and there, or a mediocre couple weeks...but we usually don't have weeks and weeks on end of shutout no hope patterns. If we can avoid that type of look setting up shop I don't mind a relax and a couple weeks of a warm/mediocre pattern, especially early. That said...we have had plenty of winters that were super warm early and flipped colder and snowier. But, throwing out the older analogs from a colder climo those years more recently...2004/5, 2006/7, 2014/15, 2015-16, 2018-19, mostly didn't turn into epic years. With the exception of 2015 (which had a LOT of luck) we went from dog crap to mediocre. It's simply hard to make up for losing half of climo and get lucky enough or an epic enough pattern to end up with a +climo year when you lose a significant chunk of what is already a short climo window. So while a slow start doesn't mean this will be a total bust awful year...it is a sign that this probably won't be a good one and we will fight to scratch and claw our way to a mediocre year. So I would like to avoid seeing that no end in sight pacific puke pattern with no high latitude help set in. Every run that avoids that is a win imo. I will start to think about actual snow results once we get into mid December and our climo clock starts to tick.

January 66 you’re thinking of.

There are some repetitive themes I like so far. One is that systems have amplified and traversed the 50/50 domain frequently. Last year too often the WAR held and systems either amplified into Quebec or washed out. It hasn’t helped us yet as you need a perfect setup this early, but if we continue to see that all winter it will pay off.

Yea in most ninos with a torch December the flip happens sometime in January, typically in a step down that starts early January. So no idea how he gets that conclusion. I agree the progression based on the mjo is ahead. If we actually do enter the warm phases early December it’s unlikely that it lasts into January. Last year we entered mjo hell about Dec 15 and by early Jan we were getting colder and that was a record long warm phase wave. His timing of a month long warm phase mjo induced torch seems odd imo. Maybe there are other factors he isn’t articulating well in the posts here. But his January flip idea wouldn’t be early either, actually typical for a nino. ETA: it’s kind of like he is the anti JB. Where everything is skewed towards the best case scenario for snow with JB...Webb skews everything towards the worst. So getting a typical outcome is like the best case scenario to him.

Even if we don’t score early season, I want to see a generally favorable look up top continue. I doubt the pac kills us all winter. Even the last few we had favorable periods. But what we haven’t had is a cooperative look up top. If we get a winter where the NAO and AO cooperate some of the time we probably can eek our way to climo with a variable pacific. That’s kind of how I was leaning in my WAG.

I don’t disagree totally but the last enso neutral winter we had was 2013/14 so I don’t think we can use a “trend” to dismiss this winter.

There are a few experts who like to dabble in the dark arts of extended range/seasonal forecasting. But none of those seasonal forecasting gurus post in this sub forum regularly. A lot of us like to make an educated guess at what winter will hold but besides the occasional attempt to read the bones most of us here don’t spend much time analyzing what will happen past 2 weeks. There are amazing experts in here who can measure up to anyone wrt forecasting inside reasonable leads though. But if you really want deep analysis/speculation about what lays behind 10 days you probably want to go follow Massiello, Tom/isotherm, bluewave, 40/70 or any of the others who go into that more in other subs or on twitter.

This is all speculative and I’ve not had time to research it much to verify anything, but I’ve wondered if the decrease in sea ice has encouraged ridging in those regions in November which could favor cold dumping into the conus. Also the increased baroclinicy from the increase in SSTs could cause volatility during the transition to the winter jet pattern. But once wavelengths broaden and the pattern settles into its winter mode, and the waters finally cool and ice over, the pattern flips. Just a thought.

You asking the boys club that doesn’t know anything for a condescending answer?

@frd I do think there are legit signs of a pattern shift in early December. However, his timeline and extent of the effects of the mjo wave propagation through warm phases seems dubious to me. Last year we had a record stall in warm phases and even that didn’t take a whole month to propagate out. We started to torch mid December due to the mjo and still got back to a colder regime by the end of the first week of January. So he is expecting another record stall in warm phases to beat last years record? He may be totally right with his numbers but his tone implies a month long warm pattern and if we do enter mjo hell in early December I find it unlikely we are still battling that come holiday week. Now last year the problem was the mjo would blast through cold phases in a week and cycle back to warm phases but that’s another issue. And there was speculation the SSWE muted the benefits of the one decent cold phase mjo wave as well. Just seems to be a lot not being taken into account.

As USAF said the atmosphere is behaving “like” a nino lately. But frankly the climo cycle recently has been a warm December no matter the enso state. I’m not entirely sure if the “warm nino” thing is due to enso or that we have had way more ninos lately which skews the results vs older ninos when colder December’s wasn’t as unusual. We had some pretty cold December ninos in the 1960s and 70s. The Atlantic and Gulf SSTs have been on fire lately. Add in the lag of sst temperatures cooling and that might have as much or more to do with the prevalence of the SE ridge early in winter lately. In essence we might be losing the early 1/3 of winter due to the current warmer SST cycle there. Only reason our mean snowfall isn’t dropping faster is we also seem to have a higher hit rate on big storms when the pattern does rarely get right. Boom and bust cycles seems to be our normal climo now, even more than it was historically.

I’ve lead that crusade plenty of times during years where the whining about what is really just a typical winter is getting out of hand. But most of the culprits of that whining don’t want to hear it. Probably because they aren’t happy with what a “typical” winter here is (admittedly our median kinda sucks) and that want to be able to whine and complain with righteous indignation 70% of the time as if the universe spit in their eye.

I won’t name names because there is nothing wrong with this, but some of the seasonal forecasters with the higher scores tend to go chalk and predict what climo says is likely most of the time. Fact is our current climo says we have a below avg snow winter 65-70% of the time. Take non nino years (yea mod nino is the winner but even weak and strong ones up the chances of a + climo year some) and the chances are like 90% we go below climo. In the last 25 non nino winters going back to 1984...only 2 have been +climo. 1996 and 2014. So basically if you predicted above avg snow every nino and below to avg every other winter you will have had a 84% verification score in the last 37 years. I could do that. Anyone could do that. But 1996 and 2014 did happen. And climo runs in cycles and you never know when it will shift. So just going climo every year you will miss the anomalies. It’s also no fun and I am in this for run. If my job depended on it I probably would go climo and pimp my great success rate.