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.