weatherwiz

Obviously long-range isn't my thing, but I've spent a great deal of time the last year really digging into it more and looking at composites for all EL Nino events but I as well think there is too much weight being thrown around on a warm Dec just because it "fits" the mold of EL Nino or stronger events. Not every single EL Nino event (regardless of strength) has produced this. I think people get too caught up in just looking at general composites. Certainly a general composite is going to give you a mean (although there is always a risk that mean can be skewed) but you have to run each individual (month, season, etc) against the mean and when differences arise, explore what caused those differences.

Certainly can't be a bad thing to see some PV displacement into our side of the hemisphere this early. I suspect this is something we'll see several times moving later into Dec and into Jan

Looking at this sends chills down my spine I feel like it's been a while since we've tracked such a look during the winter. There are sizable differences though with the evolution of that trough digging into and progressing across the Ohio Valley later this week so right now anything is on the table. The GFS seems a bit more consistent though and has trended in a direction of a phasing scenario.

You snooze you lose

Pretty decent warm core. +15C or so at 850

Probably even a pretty solid snow event for the ski areas in northern VT

If this were even 4-6 weeks later this would be some big time excitement in terms of tracking

hmmm the 12z GFS is going to be a tad interesting me thinks

I mean how often do we see significant winter storms before Christmas? How many of our winter's are generally "front loaded". And I don't count getting 15'' in December with a seasonal total of 32'' as "front loaded". December we're still eradicating milder temperatures and building cold into southeast Canada. Moving into March we're still more likely to have a significant cold source around.

Yeah I don't see why there are always so many freak outs for lack of snow in December or even November. I would figure pretty much everyone in this region's climatological max for snowfall is January/February. This has been mentioned a million times before (although not sure if the past 10-15 years has changed this) but at least BDL used to average more snow in March than December.

This is an area I want to really brush up more. I think a lot of our signals (looking in the 6-10 day...maybe even a bit further out) really start from this region. The last few winters we all kept getting excited for these "great" "positive" pattern changes being modeled 7-10 days out and they never happened. My hunch is 1. the changes were the result of changes within the SLP field and jet over this continent 2. Those changes never verified over the continent so we never saw the changes happen here. Essentially, what I'm getting at is if forecast models are signaling big changes 7-10 days out here and it steams from changes over Asia/Russia say 3 days out...it's important to look at verification of the fields over Russia/Asia/ If those changes didn't happen then chances our we're not seeing much change either. This is all just simple classification an of course.

That's probably a better method than just a raw index itself, thanks!

do you know where to get MT/AAM data these days?

As always, this was very thoroughly done and a great read. It makes me very happy and I feel a bit more confident that we are pretty much on the same page as to how this winter will evolve. I enjoyed your sections when you went into the Walker Cell/Hadley Cells into great depth and how you focused on the lack of gradient within the Pacific with retrospect to SST's and SLP. This is something that I noted as well but didn't go into great depths about, neither within my post or with analyzing. One big difference between what we've done with the breakdowns is you did EP, Basin Wide, and Modoki breakdowns. I did not have a basin wide category. Perhaps my favorite part of your outlook is the depth you go into regarding the background warming as a result of climate change and how that needs to be factored in. The RONI and EMI are something I'm going to further explore as well. I will be re-reading your sections on solar/volcanic impacts on the stratosphere several times. This is a subject I have little knowledge in and you really break this down to where it's easy enough to develop a building block to learn from and further explore.

Hope you have some pretty nice looking TP comabt

Agreed and I can't see the PV ever really getting an opportunity to become seasonably strong and dominant. I am also fine with "less blocky". Not only do we reduce the potential for suppression with less blocky but I think we increase the potential for pattern re-loading instead of just a stagnant, decaying pattern.

Yeah possible...which if that happens I may start to get a little worried (but that is going to depend how we're looking in the stratosphere). But given how (and I'm reading through your winter outlook now) it seems we're along the same thought process regarding needing the Arctic to cooperate, if we start getting any delay in that I may get a bit nervous. But if we're at least evolving towards emerging blocking holding off a few weeks won't be too bad. IMO, any instances of +AO we see going into or through December, is going to be a product of the hemispheric evolution of the synoptic pattern and will not really be reflective of stratospheric evolution. This is why I like 1957-1958 as my top analog. If any positive instances of AO/NAO are driven by synoptic evolutions and not stratospheric this will tell me the two aren't coupled and the stratosphere is setting up for blocking...and that eventually we will see this become reflective within the troposphere and then the stratosphere/troposphere become coupled...and in a way to where we can deliver. But in this scenario I do think there would be at least some possibility of suppression but that would be the product of some highly anomalous blocking.

I wouldn't be shocked, in fact, I'm anticipating a +NAO regime to evolve for the month of December, but we see a transition to a more blocking regime probably by late month.

Once the Iguanas start migrating north

Next week looks rather complex, especially with that signal for a cut-off to develop across the southern states. Just looking at the GFS though, taken verbatim, I wouldn't be shocked if we ended up with more of a trough into the Northeast next week and after this weekend/early next weeks shot of colder air, the remainder of the week remains on the cooler side. Seems like the split flow in the E PAC kind of hurts us from being colder?

Heavy, heavy frost this morning when I woke up.

I'll have to read your outlook over the next few days. Weather is extremely quiet so I should be able to no problem. I read some literature which classified 1991-1992 as Modoki. I'll go and and read your thoughts but at when I was assessing the development, I could see why it was classified as Modoki. The greatest anomalies were always within the central Pacific and it appears the development of this EL Nino occurred in the central Pacific and built east at times. But if this is not Modoki...my hunch would be how this evolved between October-November where the stream off warmer anomalies actually developed within 1.2 and built west towards the anomalies in the CP. But to me at least it always seemed this was a CP EL Nino or a bit of a hybrid

Perfect time!

Cool looking

1957-1958 winter incoming. Would be amazing if the pattern were able to develop faster than in 1957-1958 Actually the pattern this month isn't *too far off* from Dec of 1957. So let's December of 1957 out of the way now and then open the flood gates come December.