psuhoffman

I agree things seem to be lining up for an early winter outbreak but we need to be prepared for a pullback and a lull period. Every analog had one. 2014 started cold in November then warmed December into January. 2009 had a break after the December blizzard. Even 2002 had a warm up after the early dec storm until xmas. The analogs suggest a snowy winter but they don't support a wall to wall one so I just don't want to see people going full tilt when we inevitably get a warm up that lasts a couple weeks. It's going to happen. Hopefully we get some snow before any pull back like 2009 or 2002. But history suggests even if we don't like 2014,2004,1986,1978 we still are probably going to do ok the second half.

You have the year right. Westminster had 12" from a storm in November 53.

Based on current trends and guidance I think it's likely to top out right near the weak/moderate divide. But I don't think it matters. All the fuss is based off the pure snowfall means for "weak" vs "moderate" ninos. But when I looked at the actual years the weak nino set was skewed lower by the years that were borderline neutral/weak. We are already past that threat imo. There didn't seem to be a discernible difference between the years in the set that peaked beteeen .7 and 1.5 on the ONI which is likely the range we will top out. There was one bad year in that set (1995) but it was a stronger than some great snow years. What we don't want is for the nino to top out around .5-.6 as those were the years that were pretty bad but we seem already to be moving well past that. Unless the nino collapses I wouldn't worry.

My daughter is named Nora Lynn. So now she just needs to marry a guy with the last name Trough!

Drought!!!

Even for the places that can do better early like you and me a lot of the nino analogs had bad starts. But most got good after New Years. Don't dispair if we have to wait.

BWI: 39 DCA: 28 IAD: 37 RIC: 20 SBY: 19 Dover: Schools definitely not closed. Do your homework!!!

Having a not bad pattern in December is huge because looking at all the analogs the only 2 that really stick out as bad feature a god awful look up top from Alaska across to Greenland that set up in December and crushed the winter. Many of the others featured meh decembers with an eastern ridge and no snow but went on to either epic second halfs or at least respectable. The rest really are similar. Even the low one 2005 was mostly just bad luck imo. If you look at the h5 pattern from January 15 on it's not all that different from the years that were epic. My take is we had one in the set where everything went right, 2010, and one where everything went wrong 2005. But if wrong is a few old fashioned moderate snowstorms the second half of winter I can live with those odds. Just get us a look where we can start to rule out the 1992/1995 analogs and I'm good.

The good old "were due" index is on our side

Interesting theory. I admit I don't know enough about it to add anything but I'll sacrifice one of our best analogs (1964) if it also takes out the one complete bust year (1995).

It's in the middle of a phase change from negative to positive. It's last value was around -10 but rising rapidly. Im not sure why Allen assumed it will end up near +10-15 this winter. That's almost unprecedented. Past Nino years where the phase changed leading into winter to positive the winter value ended up positive but in the +3-8 range. So when he used 8 as the cutoff it left him with little analogs. But 1964 and 78 had similar qbo values leading up to winter. I'm not an expert on the qbo though. I should have included the pdo in my analysis. The results don't change much though. The rest of the signals in modoki years seem random and conflicting. Very little discernible correlation. Perhaps then the enso is the driving factor unless it's a year like 95 where a raging positive nao and ao wreck everything.

Yea but the winters of 64 and 95 were polar opposites so what good is this for predicting the winter outcome?

Happy Holloween

So I decided to compile some data for the winter and just see what it suggests. We have discussed all this before I just wanted to put it all together. This is all obviously subjective but I started with looking for enso years that were somewhat close since we know that is one of the most significant driving factors on the pattern AND its one that we can predict with reasonable accuracy now from this range. So we are expecting a central based enso event that will probably peak with an ONI somewhere near 1 for the winter months. So lets give ourselves a leeway of .3 plus or minus that and identify central based events that peaked with a winter ONI value between .7 and 1.3, and that gives us 8 seasons. A reasonable sample size. The winters of (using January as the year) 1964, 1969, 1978, 1987, 1995, 2003, 2005, and 2015. If somehow this event ends up stronger then expected the years of 1958, 1966, 1992 and 2010 become enso analogs. I am not totally sure how much the strength matters versus where the forcing is. This is partially because I found the 4 years that were stronger still had many of the same tendencies as the weaker ones. You will see that below. So before we start to break the analogs down even more by additional factors there is a pretty clear overall tendency in those years. If we look at all 12 modoki nino's since 1950, 8 were above normal snowfall. 2 were about average. And 2 were total crap. So just using modoki nino we would have a 67% chance of above normal snowfall. 17% normal and 17% below. What if we narrow it down to the 8 ninos similar in location AND strength. Then we get 5 above normal, 2 near normal, and 1 dud (1995). That gives us 63% chance at above normal snowfall, 25% chance of normal, 13% chance below. Considering the small sample size that isn't a significant difference in our odds. Furthermore the characteristics of the seasons were similar among the sample of stronger modoki nino's as the weaker ones. 3/4 of the stronger ones were good winters. 5/8 of the weaker ones were. And the seasonal variance and how they got there was similar. The good years featured help in the north pacific from either an Aleutian low or an epo ridge and blocking over the top. The two dud winters (one from each set) featured little help in the north Pacific AND a raging positive AO/NAO that pretty much ruined the winter. There was also a tendency to finish strong. A few years had early starts, but except for the dud's they all had strong second halfs with a snowy period sometime in January/February. So some started bad then recovered. The ones that started with snow in December all went on to be blockbuster years. So a good start would be a very good sign, but a bad start doesnt mean we are doomed a few years in our analog set had no snow before January and went on to be good years like 1978, 1987, and 2015. However on the down side having a bad start does open the door to 1995 being an analog. So what if we try to narrow down the analogs by other factors. Here is where it gets tricky. I can look at the factors but I have no idea which is actually most important in any given year. There are a lot of conflicting signals. But if we take the 8 best enso matches this is how they fit in for other factors like qbo, and solar. I ranked the matches based on similarity of enso, QBO phase and solar. The snowfall is for BWI 1964: ONI 1.3, QBO was very similar, also a low solar year. GREAT MATCH BWI Snowfall: 51.8" 1995: ONI 1.1, QBO almost identical, Also a low solar year, GREAT MATCH BWI snowfall 8.2 1978: ONI .8, QBO almost identical to this year, Solar was average, GOOD MATCH BWI snowfall 34.3 1969: ONI 1.1, QBO was somewhat similar but the flip happened later, Solar was a bad match, Decent Match BWI snowfall 18.6" 2005: ONI .7, QBO similar value but opposite phase flip, Solar medium, Decent Match BWI snowfall 18" 1987: ONI 1.2, QBO was almost opposite of now, Also a low solar year, Decent Match BWI snowfall 35.2 2003: ONI 1.1, QBO similar value but during the opposite phase flip, Solar high, Decent Match BWI snowfall 58.1 2015: ONI .7, QBO not a good match, Solar not a good match, weak Match overall BWI snowfall 28.7" So the best matches were 1964 and 1995. 1978 was also a very good match. That doesn't really help because the two best matches were almost total opposites. I wish I could say for sure what made 1995 be the lone bad outlier. I can say the SST's that year in the north pacific were almost opposite right now and most of the other years since 1984. The problem is I cannot compare 1995 to 1978 or 1964 the other closest matches because I cannot find good SST data for those years. If someone has that information I would gladly do the comparison. But given what I have to look at those two years seem very similar. As for what went wrong in 1995 compared to the others. It seems clear in the set that there is a high frequency of both a favorable north pacific pattern that features lower hights near and south of the Aleutians and an EPO ridge. There is also a high prevalence of NAO blocking. Some of those years only had one or the other but that was able to compensate for the lack of the other. 1992 and 1995 were the only years in the 12 year set where neither established at any point in the winter and so the whole year was crap. I would say the thing we want to look out for, if we start to see lower heights setting up over Alaska and a raging positive NAO going into December, that would be a sign we are heading towards 1992 and 1995. That was the characteristic of those fails. Having a warm December but with ambiguous patterns in those areas would be more similar to the years we recovered later. As for the worry by some about a weak modoki being worse...the data just doesn't indicate that. 1978 only peaked with an ONI of .8 which is below where we are expected to peak. 2003 was only 1.1 and 2015 only peaked at .7. 1995, the worst case peaked at 1.1 so it was stronger then some of the better years. And the other total dud 1992 peaked at 1.7 on the ONI. Because it's such a small sample size one year can skew things and that is probably what is happening on the correlations that say weaker is worse... because just looking at the years and the results it doesn't seem to indicate that. So what do I take out of this... Well first of all 8/12 and 5/8 doesn't guarantee us anything. 1992 and 1995 happened and are a cautionary tale. 2005 is another cautionary tale, the second half of that year featured a good pacific and Atlantic pattern and could easily have been another 1958 or 2015 type ending but we just didn't get lucky. But we did get snow so it wasnt a disaster. But these probabilities are almost the exact opposite of what we were dealing with the last 2 years when I broke down the analogs and we were left praying for that fluke year or two that was good in the set. This year any way you slice it the majority of years are good. So while we have to wait and see how this is evolving, and make sure some crazy shift in the expected pattern isnt taking place, I like where we are right now way more then where we were heading into the last few winters.

I went back and did some digging on 1953 and 59... both peaked at +0.6 on the ONI scale. This is borderline weak nino status, but many data sources don't list a nino unless it reaches .7 for a seasonal ONI. NCEP now lists a nino as + or - .5 which means very few neutral years and a much lower threshold to get an enso event. I am not sure including such borderline events is really pertinent as we are already at a monthly value near 1 and almost all guidance suggests this nino event peaks around December somewhere between +.8 and +1.4 with a mean near +1 on the guidance. If this event totally collapses then some of those borderline neutral/very weak nino events could become better analogs, but on the other hand there are lots of factors that could change that would change the analogs in other ways, we have to go with some kind of expected state to eliminate years. But there were other weak modoki years where the results were good as I will show in the data I compiled so I am not sure it matters much.

52/53, 58/59, and 76/77 aren't listed as modoki nino's on the two sources I used to identify modoki years. 53 and 59 were listed as a neutral years 77 was a traditional nino 92 and 95 were modoki nino's and were complete failures 05 was a modoki and like most modoki's mid January through March featured a pretty good pattern and we did recover to an average snowfall winter but just got a little unlucky not to get a flush hit from any storm. A couple just missed, and a couple had big time potential but ended up only being moderate storms and didnt get their act together. I am about to do a longer post regarding what the analogs indicate regarding this winter. Not necessarily a prediction just a "what does the data show".

Interesting take...i wonder why the smaller markets didn't seem to do that. More humble maybe? Lol

I agree with both. And this isn't a big deal. I don't care much or lose sleep over this. But it's always struck me as bad form to have a map and be so sloppy with the edges. If your not going to put any effort into making PA or WV accurate then why not just zoom the map in and not have them at all? It's no big deal but I've never understood it. It also seems worse in the D.C. area. When I lived in the Philly, Scranton/Wilkes Barre or State College PA markets they didn't seem as bad. Their maps would only cover the area they were giving a legit forecast for. Often the map wouldn't even be a square and would simply include the counties in their viewing area and it was obvious they put effort into the whole area. Not sure why the D.C. and Baltimore outlets put out these huge area maps then only bother with the viewing area. Just seems silly but maybe I'm crazy!

That is exactly what was happening in some cases. Then I also think after a couple (or a few if 2016 sucked in your opinion) bad years there was a contingent of posters who decided we were all wasting our time and they were going to "save us" from ourselves by blocking up the discussion threads. That was pretty much my take on what was going on. They were upset and wanted everything to burn. They didn't care that they were ruining it for those of us that still wanted to track and have logical discussions about it since they had decided we were being stupid and it was a waste of time. It was the epitome of immature behavior.

That's always been obvious to me also. Sometimes they do that around the edges of their snowstorm maps also. If you look up into PA or out west they pay no attention to what their snowfall ranges do in those areas. If they aren't going to put any effort into that area they should simply make the map area smaller and not include it. If there is an area I am not too familiar with and don't want to bother with it I just don't include it in my map.

But you said you gave up that endeavor and some still managed to spew their crazy into all the other threads anyways. But I loved the panic room. Hopefully we can continue it in your absence.

For our own sanity we should pool all our money and rent out some cabin community in the mountains that always has snow for Christmas week and save us from the yearly obsessing over something that doesn't come 95% of the time.

Everything looks fine right now. But that's not going to stop the freak outs from the usual suspects every bad model run or warm November day. If we get to December with nothing but a raging PV and blowtorch in front of us then maybe it's time to get nervous although even then the analogs suggest most years that start warm recover after December anyways.

I like JI but he has admitted he posts his melt downs in the serious discussion threads because he wants an audience. If we actually did set up a specific place for melt downs and nonsense and he keeps posting that in the serious threads then that probably deserves a warning then a short term suspension if he keeps it up. Im not sure I actually want that. I like the jokes and banter that lighten the mood. I'm not trying to squash fun. But we have some people who don't know when to chill out. And we have a few legit crazies. And at times they can turn a good discussion into a complete mess. It's one thing to read a few funny posts then back on topic. But when a whole page becomes nothing but "where's my snow this sucks" it kills the serious discussion. And the worst part is that's exactly what some want. Avant/Vice thinks we should talk global warming 24/7 and wants to derail anything else because it's a distraction from his agenda. Some others have these melt downs where they decide the weather hates us and we are wasting our time and then they try to destroy the discussion because they think it's useless. It's childish behavior. I'm not talking about the funny banter between friends that goes on. But how do you get rid of one without the other?

if so maybe i saw the wrong year for Boston's total...either way it was a crappy snow winter anywhere around here with only one storm and pretty much nothing else.