BlizzardWx

I've slowly been working on a weather model/ climate index page. I think it's far enough along to share. https://weathersigma.com/sst Within this tab you can select a range of dates to display. I've run it back to the start of 2024 if you want to check past data. Each map has a bunch of index values along the bottom. They don't perfectly agree with other sources but some of that is related to exact methodology, region of choice for the index, data set, and so on. My IOD doesn't run as cold as what I've seen on here, for example. If you find it useful, find errors, or it needs changes, let me know. But I hope it'll be useful. It updates daily like the world climate service site. The 2nd image is an IOD plot, which can be selected near the bottom of the menu.

I saw JB referenced @GaWx on one of his blogs and called him by name. Maybe JB reads all of the hate about himself on here too

The issue still remains why that occurred, but this does make sense otherwise.

I remember last year the mid level PV was often partly to mostly uncoupled from the lower level PV, or maybe it was just much weaker than the mid level vortex. Am I remembering that right? I wonder if there are any hints of that happening again.

FWIW this is exactly what I was talking about in my last post. People need to stop reading into what happened at exactly their house (mesoscale randomness) and assume it means anything in the big picture. That level of precision is noise and does not mean a pattern was good or bad.

I'm not sure exactly how you would do it, but I know I'd like to see more winter outlooks or past winter discussion focusing on snowfall potential rather than what fell at specific points when possible. Maybe another way to look at it would be to say is this objectively a snow producing pattern even if it didn't occur at Central Park (or wherever). If we could remove luck (mesoscale patterns) from more of our analysis I imagine it would be more constructive to discussion of the patterns at hand. I think some of what @donsutherland1 has been showing is kind of a step in that direction. You could in theory score a pattern based on its historical correlation to snowy patterns to say how good a winter should have been regardless of what actually happened at some point. Just a thought.

I do think the pattern coming up will favor slowly moving that warm pool in the central Pacific a bit further east with continued cooling influences east of Japan and along the west coast, at least for the next 2 weeks anyway.

I appreciate your views and everybody else's. I come here to see viewpoints from all angles. I'd say the same thing to you as well as everybody else, please continue to contribute. I value it.

Hopefully time to finally kill the -PDO and MJO 4-6 warm pool with that flip.

True. I do think ridging ends up a bit less amplified than last year, but I still think we see cold get a bit further south than what it has.

EPS weeklies try to bring the GOA trough back by the 20th of this month. But on the other hand they didn't see this GOA ridge until a few days ago. But considering this GOA ridge will probably be a dominant feature this winter I am not surprised to see it poking back up.

That was when one of the worst ice storms for northeast OK occurred. Please no

Definitely unusual as you noted, but does it matter if the forcing is propagating the "wrong" direction? Off hand I am not sure why it necessarily matters directly, but indirectly it implies a weakness in potential analog forecasts.

The more I hear about this SAI index, the more questionable it sounds. But as for the northeast Pacific, I agree it will probably continue to cool given the storm track. It could always reverse later of course, but I see no sign of that through October at least.

Yes, and he says that. But I suppose if September is well above normal it could in theory help October. I don't know, just passing it along basically.

I'm not real big on the Siberian snow cover thing. But Judah Cohen posted this on X saying we are off to a good start and on track to continue.

As most of you probably know, the PDO is the first EOF and explains the greatest amount of variability in the northern Pacific. But there are other modes that matter. I was looking at a paper from Werb and Rudnick in 2023. They showed how historically the PDO accounted for 23% of variance with the 2nd EOF at 13%. But noted how that second EOF in the past decades increased to 18%. It might even be more than that now. But the point I wanted to make is that this 2nd EOF looks a lot like the pattern we have had lately, particularly with the stronger anomalies off of Japan. Obviously a bit mixed given waters are also warm off the west coast. I'd say we have a -EOF 1 (-PDO) combining with a +EOF 2 right now. Has any work looked at the winter effects of this second EOF? It's not the exact same thing as the NPM. We really ought to be paying more attention to it. In a broader sense, the lack of contrast across the Pacific will affect how the -PDO manifests itself compared to the last few winters. It's probably the most widespread warm blob we have seen.

I wonder if this will continue into winter. Any thoughts? I know a lot of our troubles the last ten years have been from too much MJO 4-6. So maybe no real MJO signal would be a plus?

The pattern the next two weeks will support additional cooling in the GOA with warming or at least maintenance of the warmth in the west Pacific. Beyond that who knows. But as others noted, the NE Pacific warm pool did collapse in October 2013 and didn't rebuild all the way until December. Obviously that was the result of the pattern though, rather than the SSTAs driving anything.

Of course! Although if the background forcing is prohibitive enough it starts to become like those trick shot videos where they are shooting baskets off of buildings

Interesting how different this summer has been than some of those years. Obviously you have to adjust the mean anomaly up or down for the various years, but where we had ridge-trough-ridge across the conus (this year), both of these other years were the opposite. Polar domain also looks quite different. Not sure what it means or not, but in my mind its the idea that the ACE correlation isn't great because there are many paths to low or high ACE.

Ultimately I think this is a good example of what @40/70 Benchmarkis always talking about and why we have to resist the urge to view things in isolation. I view the winter pattern like the mosaic of ripples on a pond if you were to throw a few stones in. Each stone could be a different index or measure of forcing. It's not the individual ripples that matter, it's the collection and how they interact that matters. Some years ENSO is the biggest stone, but maybe not in the case of 23-24. Similarly, when I look at the global SSTA's this year, there is no doubt that the North Pacific is going to be our biggest "stone". But even then we have to be careful to not simplify it to a "hot north pacific". The relative location of the max anomalies and gradients matters. And you can't pick that kind of stuff up from a blanket index. That is why although in theory you could say well we have a big negative pdo, enso, and iod so that means such and such, but it's the details within these zones that may make or break winter.

Interesting that the ECMWF weeklies seem to want to develop a GOA low for mid September and October. If that did happen I imagine we'd start to erase a lot of those warm anomalies south of Alaska like last year.

Nighttime lows holding up temperatures here too. This summer: June High/Low: -0.3F / +1.9F July High/Low: -1.2 F / +3.2 F August High/Low: -3.6F / +0.9F I don't think this is too unusual around here either. Lows are being held up by higher moisture levels.

Oh don't get me wrong, I am not saying there is no comparison. There are several reasons why it could be an analog, I was just trying to note that there are many serious differences from a SSTA perspective that should not be glossed over.