Terpeast

49 minutes ago, pazzo83 said:

i am really thankful for that week - better than nothing.

That’s the best attitude we can have and carry through the year, and possibly through next winter. 

The biggest irony of this season is we got our best wintry week not from a nino STJ pattern, but more of a nina-like Alaska ridge pattern (-EPO) combined with a short-lived greenland block (-NAO). 

If we’re going to play the “everyone zigs, we zag” game, we better hope that two things happen at the same time during next year’s nina - 1) pac ridge nudges poleward into alaska AND 2) we get greenland blocking to hold any cold air down

But my wag is that we don’t get any blocking, and we get 2022-23 without the cold xmas week. I’d pay money to be wrong. 

27 minutes ago, pazzo83 said:

This winter (DJF) in DC averaged 43.2F.  Last winter was 44F.  Like you said, that's a typical winter like 200-300 miles south of here.

Not much difference, even though it felt much colder this year thanks to the mid-Jan wintry week with two SECS that trended the right way for us. 

1 hour ago, psuhoffman said:

Yea, I am definitely NOT saying this is climate change.  I don't know.  But there has been very little discussion around this phenomenon at all, and that surprises me.  I think because it's being written off as part of the larger PDO cycle.  And a LARGE part of the western trough eastern ridge is most definitely related to the PDO.  Yes the pacific has spend the vast majority of the time in a configuration that is conducive to a western trough eastern ridge longwave pattern.  

But there is variance within that.  Just like we don't have an eastern trough 100% of the time in a positive PDO there is variability to the pacific pattern in a -PDO.  The issue is I've noticed that during the perhaps 30% of the time where the pacific longwave pattern is not such that should amplify a trough in the west, about half that time it still is.  Waves are coming in off the pacific and just wanting to amplify in the west regardless of what the upstream pattern is.  I am just trying to flag this and start a conversation about it since I think this is part of what's making this period even worse than a typical -PDO cycle.  

I threw out 2 factors I can think of.  The SER being fed not just by the western pattern but also by the warmer waters downstream could be offering some resistance...and stronger waves coming in off the pacific perhaps making it more likely they amplify sooner and then get stuck in the mountain west due to feedback there.  Then you get an awful feedback loop between these 2 factors where the SER slows down the waves some which are already stronger and then they amplify more which pumps the ridge in front more...and UGH.  

But I have no idea if that is it.  But no one else is even talking about it at all and offering other ideas.  I am open to any ideas.  I am not really open to the "this isn't actually happening" arguments because I've seen it too often.  The waves obviously eventually come east...and its not happening all the time, yes sometimes we get a perfect EPO/PNA ridge that forces a huge trough into the east at times...but quite often even when the longwave configuration in the central and eastern pac would suggest waves should kick east before amplifying they are still amplifying more west first which pumps a ridge in front which means even when they do kick east its not going to work for us because there is too much heat in front of them.  I see this...and I see no discussion about it which is frustrating because above all else I want to learn and understand.  

I get your frustration around the lack of discussion of what's causing the ridge/trough flip. I notice this more and more, but tbh I don't have any good answers to offer as to what's causing this. Really. Gun to head, I'll still say "I don't know." 

I hope we get some real answers either from yet another shift in the pattern, or from climate scientists smarter than us publishing new papers on this.

We could blame the MJO, but I think that's too convenient of a target. It could be the +EAMT since all the cold has been on the other side. It could be the Atlantic, but I'm not buying it 100%. Again, I hope the answers become clearer to us sooner than later.

@psuhoffman I was just thinking that last year, CA mountains received record snowfall during a La Nina year, and now they are again getting record snowfall during an El Nino year. ENSO doesn’t seem to matter. I think that gives your posts about opposite pacific configurations giving the same western trough eastern ridge more validity than people seem to be giving it. I don’t know if this is caused by CC, or just part of a cycle. We used to have a persistent western ridge eastern trough for years while I was growing up here, and I thought that was a permanent fixture of north american climate. The opposite seems to be happening now, which makes me think it is more cyclical. 

I miss reading sky-is-falling AFDs with incoming HECS. Reading the reno and sacramento ones brings back a lot of memories

1 hour ago, Blizzard of 93 said:

Temps look to possibly cooperate as well according to this Weeklies run for the last 2 weeks of March.

Just not cold enough. In late march it gotta be dark blue or green.

On 2/27/2024 at 6:03 PM, katabatic said:

I live in Maryland but coming out to Donner ski area for the storm. Looking forward to being in your area!

How were you able to find a place to stay at short notice? 

44 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

I was in that band... one of many storms I've chased over the years.  Helped someone driving some 80s oldsmobile near Yale who had no business being on the roads get unstuck twice only to watch him immediate drive into the next snow drift lol.  Had to dig myself off the highway in New Haven because none of the exits were plowed yet.  Was stuck there for a couple days.  

But...I actually didn't find the band itself all that impressive.  It was very wet, and windy, and while it was snowing incredibly hard it didn't look as aesthetically pleasing as some other heave snow events I've witnessed.  The heaviest sustained snow I've ever experienced still remains the first few hours of the Feb 10 2010 storm here...not the CCB the following day but that WAA band that set up the night before and was mostly a mix down near DC and Baltimore...we had this crazy convective band sitting over us here for 3 hours and got about a foot of snow from it.  But it was not windy and just cold enough so it was HUGE flakes and looked even harder then it was...not that 3-4" an hour wasn't heavy snow.  

Interesting. I did see someone in the CT forum complaining that the snow under the death band was heavily rimed. He still got 40 inches.

Btw, I was in one of the Buffalo LES events back in Dec 2001, one place got over 80" but where I was we "only" got 30-36". Kinda wild to see it go from 3 feet to barely an inch in just 15 minutes driving on I-90 east towards Rochester. The rest of the winter was crap, even up in Rochester.

21 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

That was the year SNE got Nemo. I hope one day I can experience what they did under that >50dbz death band.

Or I can just go to the Sierras. Or to Buffalo

It was basin wide

1 hour ago, CAPE said:

The potential for around the 10th has looked like a Miller B type deal with the primary tracking well NW. Latest ens runs are further south with both the primary and secondary coastal development, but still plenty of spread. This period is probably it for snow chances in the lowlands. Beyond that it looks like a ridge over Hudson again with a trough digging out west. Then we are beyond mid month.

If this still looks workable inside of 7 days, then I shall track, too

13 minutes ago, CAPE said:

Pretty much. We seem to have a better shot of getting cross polar flow in Nina to produce a cold period if the Aleutian ridge morphs into a -EPO/+PNA pattern. With a gradient initially as the cold presses southeastward and flattens/dislodges the eastern ridge, just need a wave to move along the boundary. That's how the early Jan 2022 storm worked. Stayed cold for a few weeks with 2 more snow events, esp for the eastern part of the region.

 

 

 

Part of me is rooting for a very strong nina to cool the oceans a tad, and hope for a few weeks of -EPO/-NAO. Just a couple/few weeks, then I’m wrapping it up as a winter. 

7 minutes ago, Ji said:

we need to rock between Nov 15 and Jan 15. Get a Jan 2022 type storm and call it a winter

That’s my thinking. If the MJO is strong in phases 4-6 in October, it would catch my interest. 
 

@psuhoffman We haven’t seen a classic sustained PNA+ ridge out west for so long. Every ridge that tried to set up west just kept getting bullied, toppled over us, and brings SER-like warmth to our area. 

1 hour ago, CAPE said:

Sometimes I get Chuck speak, other times not so much lol.

I guess it depends on which days. Sometimes what he says makes perfect sense and perfectly summarizes what was nagging in my mind and couldn’t put my finger on it. Other times, I’m like

In case the mods get pissed again about having to move posts - let me provide an easier solution:

Simply change the name of this thread. 
 

You’re welcome. 

5 minutes ago, Stormchaserchuck1 said:

The PDO talk drives me crazy. It's not some independent thing, It's feedback from previous patterns. Air is so much lighter than water, so it changes first.. then the water warms/cools. All that's being spotted with the PDO is pattern marks, some alternate mechanism, unless the Pacific rim is active or something.. 

That’s where I disagree. Both air AND water are drivers working in tandem, not just air ON water. It’s a two way street.

The marine heat wave off Japan is exerting its own influence and a powerful one at that. Zoom in on Japan, you’ll see SSTa off the charts. Take a look, and tell me that isn’t having any effect on the atmospheric pattern.

10 minutes ago, roardog said:

I feel for you guys down there. You've been through some rough times in an area that is already rough if you like winter weather. You guys finally get a Nino like you were hoping for after 3 winters of Nina and it's a super Nino with a -PDO. The closest example of that is '72-'73 and if you look at the mean 500MB anomaly map from this winter, to no surprise it looks almost identical to '72-'73. Add in a warmer world and the result shouldn't have been surprising to anyone.

The extreme -PDO that has developed since the late 2010s has obviously been a big problem for you guys and the entire east coast. We can't buy a sustained winter +PNA since the PDO nosedived but I just can't believe it's some kind of permanent change. My guess is it's no more permanent than the north pacific "warm blob" was in the mid 2010s. 

I don’t think the extreme -pdo is permanent either, but it’s quite the hole to dig out of. Not even a borderline super nino could get us out of that, although it got close but then it collapsed in Feb. 

We at least did get two SECS in Jan and a minor event in Feb, and that’s got to count for something within a 72-73 analog in a warmer world. 

One thing I’ll say about these LR charts is this. 

As long as we’re in a -PDO driven by the marine heat waves in the west pacific and off Japan, I would place no faith in LR charts no matter how good they may look. 

57 minutes ago, Maestrobjwa said:

Whoa, whoa hollld up...ya just dropper something there. And it may become a punchline here, lol, but now that ya mention it you can't help but wonder...

I'm just the messenger. Look at where Fukushima is on Google Maps, and then compare that location against the warmest SST anomalies on those two CFS forecast maps @GaWx above. 

10 minutes ago, mdhokie said:

Is the heat wave located anywhere near where they are dumping all the radioactive water into the ocean?

The hottest SSTa of the marine heat wave is almost exactly where, and downstream of, Fukushima, the site from where they are dumping radioactive water. 

I haven’t come across any research that this is the cause, but I can’t seriously believe that this is a mere coincidence. 

1 hour ago, LibertyBell said:

we need a massively active typhoon season out there to do that don't we?

Yeah, and it has to be on the pacific side. I don’t see how atlantic activity would help.

2 hours ago, chubbs said:

This paper indicates that man-made aerosol effects on enso can be prolonged, well after the emissions have been reduced. Could help explain recent favoring of la nina.

The discrepancy between the observed lack of surface warming in the eastern equatorial Pacific and climate model projections of an El Niño-like warming pattern confronts the climate research community. While anthropogenic aerosols have been suggested as a cause, the prolonged cooling trend over the equatorial Pacific appears in conflict with Northern Hemisphere aerosol emission reduction since the 1980s. Here, using CESM, we show that the superposition of fast and slow responses to aerosol emission change—an increase followed by a decrease—can sustain the La Niña-like condition for a longer time than expected.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2315124121

Great article. The last line in this paper opens the possibility for a reversal to an el nino background state once the aerosol effect on enso runs its course (if they’re correct about the cause)

9 hours ago, GaWx said:

 Now I see that he appears to be getting the +PDO forecast idea from the WB CFS SSTa prog for Nov. based on 10 days of runs with a 1981-2010 base: look how cold it has the IO, the area between Japan and Hawaii, the S Pacific from E of Australia out several thousand miles, the strip from off the SE US to the N Atlantic, and the SW Atlantic to just off S. America. These 5 areas are mainly BN with coldest of -2 to sub -3! Then note the warmth off W N. America with as warm as +2 off Baja. That does look like a moderate +PDO being progged on the WB map for Nov:

 But compare the WB prog to TT’s CFS SSTa for Nov. (below), which is based on 3 days of runs with a 1984-2009 base: the IO’s coldest is -1.2 (vs -WB’s -2) and the other 4 areas areas are mainly warmer than normal with much of it +0.8 to +2.5 (vs WB’s mainly BN with coldest of -2 to sub -3)! In addition, the area off Baja that has its warmest of +2 on WB is only +1.0 at its warmest on the TT map and is cooler than most of the area from there to off Japan, making it a -PDO being forecasted on the TT Nov map:

 

How can they be so different? Any opinions? The bases aren’t that different and I don’t see for relatively stable SSTa’s how 10 days worth of runs would make much difference vs 3 days of runs. I think the main problem may be with WB’s algorithms.

Good question. They aren’t so different in certain domains like ENSO, IO, MC, and even off the US West coast. But in the extra-tropical west pacific they could not be more different. 

I think part of the answer is that the marine heat wave off Japan is an extreme climatological event that is neither reproducible or predictable by any climate model, let alone any seasonal forecasting models. 

Find a way to dissipate that marine heat wave, then maybe we have a chance at colder winters again. 

23 minutes ago, GaWx said:

 Yep, 95-96 would be an obvious bet for him if the PDO were to switch to positive just like that La Niña winter’s PDO switch. And then if he were to give up on the PDO switching, he could still fall back on 2010-1 with its strong -PDO Niña. Got to keep business going strong!

Weenie post warning:

Well if we go with a 2010-11 analog, maybe that boxing day redux would be a hit for our forum instead of a heartbreaking miss. 

2 minutes ago, WEATHER53 said:

Couple pages back. I’m not in here constantly so the info won’t always be on same page 

I looked 3 pages back to now, and found nothing of substance from your posts except “don’t trust day 15 models”

Maybe I missed it, or maybe I didn’t dig deep enough. But if you really want to foster change in this forum in terms of how to do seasonal forecasting, don’t send us digging for that information. We don’t have time for that. Make a standalone thread and link to it instead.