weatherwiz

Yeah great point. For La Nina's the focus was on 120°W to 170°W for anomalies. Since EL Nino's tend to incorporate a larger swath of anomalies and also more into the N1.2 zone, may have to extend analysis through entire ENSO zone (180° to 80°W) and if core anomalies 160-180 call that West-Based, 160-120 Basin Wide, and 120-80 East-Based

I will definitely check that out! I'll admit...I don't really understand modoki events and what really classifies an event as modoki. I've read around a bit but find differing opinions. Something I need to look into more. I know you've highlighted them in the past so I'll go back through some of your posts.

IDK...I think this can go either way but I certainly can see your argument for west-based. the core of the anomalies are certainly positioned towards the western edge of the ENSO region. May have to really go back and do another look through. This may have to be approached differently then cold anomalies.

1929-1930 1958-1959 1968-1969 2004-2005 2014-2015 2009-2010 I did as basin wide 2002-2003 basin wide 1977-1978 basin wide 1957-1958 basin wide I may have to definitely look more into OLR to perhaps do a better breakdown.

Hopefully something pans out by 01/20. If not time to fire up the countdown to May 1

Well I figured may as well start working on EL Nino composites. Grabbed SSTA's for all EL Nino's to try and break down into west-based, basin-wide, and east-based. I found this much more challenging then with La Nina's. The breakdown I came up with was West-based: 5-events Basin-wide: 25-events East-based: 10-events One thing I noticed was alot of variance in SSTA's across the north-central Pacific and just west off the West Coast. I don't recall such variance with La Nina, but I never saved the SSTA composites for Nina's so I have to go back and do that. But given this I think I may try to also take a focus on SSTA's outside of the ENSO region when assessing EL Nino events

I thought the NBM was to fix some of those issues. It even struggled big time with the Arctic air last week. I think one night DEN got down to like -24 and MOS/NBM was way off. It's pretty cool how NBM gives a percentile output but that doesn't even capture the full potential. Bufkit is still the best way to forecast temps but way too time consuming.

It's amazing how terrible MOS (and this even includes the NBM b/c that isn't particularly good) can be at temperature forecasts. And this statement applies for the entire country.

Going to the Pats game Sunday so thrilled it's going to be on the mild side! Monday is the winter classic at Fenway Park...looks great for the Bruins/Penguins game. Hope they can keep the ice hard enough.

Great post. Certainly can't overlook the EPO and its climatology and how the EPO is evolving as well. I was also thinking this. When we do composites on indices such as NAO, AO, etc. we're focusing on the 500 height anomalies. In reality though, aren't these indices more of a measure of differences in SLP between your consistent pressure systems (I know at least the NAO is). I was doing some composites with the NAO and looking at SLP anomalies vs. height anomalies, there definitely can be a difference in where the core SLP anomalies are vs. the height anomalies. Too make this shorter, I wonder if where the core SLP anomalies are located and structured holds significant weight and could, perhaps, even be more of an indicator then 500 height anomalies itself?

It would be so much work (though having programming knowledge in like Python it would probably be super easy). That def seems like a period of interest.

Regarding the PNA, this is why I so badly want to breakdown these indices on a weekly to biweekly level instead of just having a monthly or seasonal average. I truly believe that having this breakdown will provide so much more insight and guidance into pattern evolution and be a huge asset for medium-to-long range forecasting. By having weekly/bi-weekly averaged values you can make plots and really visualize the short-term changes. When we make our composites and correlations and are tied into the monthly averaged values, and are comparing say snowfall or temperatures or precipitation, you end up with a large spread in the results which leads to a larger standard deviation. For example, comparing seasonal or monthly snowfall totals to the -NAO/+NAO phase. Now the data averaged out yields a better correlation to above-average snowfall with a -NAO and below-average with +NAO. but when you list snowfall totals for each +/- NAO season, there will be a large spread. I think breaking this stuff down into smaller time-scales will eliminate some of this spread.

I'm starting to become a firm believer in the idea that if you've become established in a long-term global regime, it is very difficult to break that regime until the entire system is "flushed". We established Nina two years ago, and even know we had the El Nino in 2018-2019 that was coming off another Nina dominated regime. Anyways, what we established globally during the 2020 year has not really changed much. Are there subtle differences within teleconnections and indices, sure, but the main theme is the same. I think if we had a wild winter in 2020-2021 we would have repeated that last winter and this winter. Everytime things look favorable in the medium-to-long range, we end up seeing the overall modeled structure shift west. This happened last week and I'm kind of kicking myself. The 7-10 days prior I was harping up potential on the East Coast but in the back of my mind I had concerns we would eventually see a major shift west. The boom...last weekend that shift started and it was a sizable shift. I think the issue for this was where the airmass source was entering the country from. Models don't handle this well when the source air enters in the vicinity of the Rocky Mountains. We will see the pattern change again moving towards mid-January, however, I would be willing to bet it's going to be the same areas impacted again...and it's the same areas that were impacted in these changes last winter and the winter before.

I'm starting to doubt whether we will get there in January. I think we need to see substantial changes even west of the Pacific...like across Russia/Asia. We continue to see extremely strong jet extensions from that continent through the Pacific with significant wave breaking occurring across the eastern Pacific and across the west coast. IMO, I think we are actually going to need stronger support for the Arctic and get blocking to become more favorable. Everytime we seem to get a favorable pattern we keep getting weaknesses and see crap cut to our west. I could be totally wrong on this, but the past few years (including this year) it seems one big problem is the exit region of the jet off the Asian continent has been displaced farther south. Having this farther north would be a major game changer.

Gotcha! That’s what I had been doing too. I was curious if it was worth it making a subset based on strength/structure during the DJF period. Doing this would negate lag but would be curious to see if there are any differences. The biggest challenges though are events which are like borderline with strength. that’s why I also want to look into other ENSO indices to help define too.

@40/70 Benchmark when you do your composites and break ENSO events by strength, are you using peak strength of the event or what the strength of the event is during the DJF trimonthly period?

Was there precip at the time? Maybe there was a very quick brief spin up TOR and it landed on the tower then went back up. It’s like Independence Day when the UFO went over the White House and boom

Some defensive lapses but the points keep coming!

Shit power flickering and there’s 3 minutes left in the game. Please hold off from going out until then

Jealous. Only thing getting smoked here are the Devils on my TV

Went to Wal mart a like 4:45 and when my girlfriend and I came out just after 6 there was a coating of snow on everything. Was getting pretty icy too. Wind be howling. If the power goes out hopefully it's a little later. I can still watch the Bruins on my laptop and use my phone for hot spot. But if I have to do that for whole game it will cut my laptop battery close.

Winds ripping again here. Definitely getting colder. My desk is next to the sliding door that goes outside and my tootsies are getting cold.

Crazy rain right now.

It's like the eye of a hurricane now. Plenty of blue sky and sun and the wind just died.

Just had a huge gust...wish I was closer to an official reporting station (I miss being like 2 min from BDL lol). That gust had to be just north of 50.