Ok, so is Lucy going to kick the football again? Today's EPS was run out of JB's basement. That's worth some private time alone in a dark room right there. -AO/-NAO/-EPO/+PNA Yahtzee!
But will it actually happen? GEFS continues to be far less enthused about west coast ridging.
And the GEFS has led the way with the current can kick. What continues to concern me is that GEFS, already with a less impressive Pacific sector than the EPS continues to correct to a stronger -PNA. Look at all this blue on the west coast in this gif. This is the GEFS forecast trend continuing to trend toward -PNA and/or more +EPO at all time steps as we march forward in time.
Past performance is not necessarily an indicator for future performance though and there continue to be reasons to think that at.some.point the Pacific will improve enough to put us in the game. So what can we look at to distinguish between the EPS and GEFS solutions? I think the big tropospheric PV over Siberia/Sea of Okhotsk is a big discriminator. Below is the D8 depiction for both systems. There *should* be notable skill at D8 to forecast the location of such major features at H5. The EPS wants to push this farther east toward Kamchatka and the Aleutians, which eventually produces the pants tent depiction above as it continues eastward.
GEFS lags it far behind and keeps it more over the Arctic Ocean and eastern Siberia. Blue over Kamchatka above, orange over it below.
By D11, EPS has troughing extending into the Aleutians and we have a pretty El Niño type NHEM pattern.
GEFS is following to some degree (notice the blue over Kamchatka now at D11), but still different enough to have some big sensible wx differences downstream for us.
The EPS continuing to show an El Niño-like pattern in the midst of a La Niña and with the GEFS continuing to push more troughing into the West Coast are two things to give us some caution. I certainly hope it happens obviously! Got to watch how that Siberian PV moves and wobbles over the next few days.