Terpeast

It was for California and Buffalo, but the rest? Not really

It’s still too early to worry about winter storm tracks this time of year. The fact that we’re having *any* EC storms now is a good sign, but only that.

The weekend rule is alive and well.

Too soon to call a peak with a new KW in the subsurface, and if we stay above 1.5 through most of the remaining 2 weeks of October, we'll likely end up with a 1.5 ASO value for ONI. Where it goes after that is anyone's guess. Either we have an early ASO peak at 1.5 (low end strong), or we have a later peak at around 1.6-1.8.

Wow, the 1950s must have been brutal for weenies... Then came the 1960s.

That's absolutely fair to say. Let's say we duplicate all the signals we were getting in 2009 into this year. In any other "normal" time, everyone would be optimistic like @nw baltimore wx just said. But after an awful 7 year stretch like the one we had, would we have that same optimism even if the same signals are staring right at us in the face? I'm not saying that's the case, but like I said in my other post, 09-10 is one of my top analog matches based on nino strength, structure, forcing, QBO, and even the PDO.

That’s going to be a lot of work and take a lot of resources. Near misses can happen both ways - cutters or suppressed waves. And a near miss for SNE can be a direct hit on the MA, and so forth. Not saying it can be done, just that it would need academic research plus reanalysis modeling. Minimum months, likely years of work.

How does that vibe compare to what we have now this year? I remember last year was pretty muted, we knew that it was going to suck (albeit not as hard as it actually did)

If this winter finds a way to fail, it won’t be for lack of storms. It’ll be the cold air

subsurface has been warming lately, no?

Yeah, that's what I was debating with bluewave about. I think ENSO is going to win out, even if it peaks moderate or low end strong. The atmospheric response will drive the SSTs instead of the other way around, and there are signs of this already happening.

Great work @griteater A little surprised that +PDO/+ENSO actually produced milder winters in the past. One thing that could explain this is the aleutian low being too strong and too close to the west coast.

One of the two, or both

And that ridge NW of Hawaii has got to go, too.

I thought 2004-05 was an okay winter for the MA by today's climate standards. We got a couple of low-end warning events down here, along with a few advisories. KIAD totaled just over 17", with most of it in J & F.

Pacific continues to change. Marine heatwave off Japan is starting to break, and some of that heat is getting displaced to the NE of Japan towards the aleutians. Strong cooling is still taking place from Japan all the way out to south of the aleutians. Typhoon is modeled to recurve towards the aleutians, which may help dissipate some of that warmth up there. The only problem is that stubborn high to the NW of Hawaii. Ensembles seem to break it down past day 10, but since it's beyond day 10, we'll have to wait and see on that.

That I agree with. We'd just have to wait them out if the polar domain ends up in our favor

Fair. But my opinion is that the climate normal period ought to be centered around the analogs you’re using. For 94-95 and 04-05, I believe we should probably use 1991-2020 particularly if you’re comparing them with years like 09-10 and 14-15.

Ok I see you’re subtracting 2002, 2009, and 2014 from the other 2 winters. I thought they were a composite of all 5, and it didn’t make sense that the warm anomalies seemed grossly exaggerated. I’m 95% sure we’re not looking at another +5 DJF winter this year. +2 probably.

That doesn’t make any sense. You can change the climate normal period before you render the plot.

Why are you using the 1971-2000 climo when 4 out of those 5 winters are later than 2000?

Yes, and the qbo is double digit negative and falling is a good sign.

I’ll have to look at the ao/nao numbers again for that season, but given How drastically different the 3 seasons I raised here is proof enough that the polar domain is going to be a determining factor for 23-24 given the enso and pdo similarities across all three. Bluewave and I were just looking at both sides of the same coin here.

That time frame was when it started flipping. I was looking all the way back to mid 2007 when the PDO went negative, deeply so, and remained that way until around summer 2009, when the el nino atmospheric response began to assert itself right in that autumn timeframe.

I also looked at the PDO index leading up to each winter, and before 09-10, there was a long duration strong negative PDO before becoming neutral. So I think the atmospheric response to the el nino was driving the bus that winter, and the pac ssts was just a response to the aleutian low, which was a response to the forcing from the CP nino. I don’t think the pdo ssts are the driver unless they are extreme.