bluewave

The big Miller A storm track east of the APPS has gone dormant for 20 years now. So JB is in one of the worst snow holes around Central PA. State College requires that particular storm track to reach near to above average snowfall. Just like our area needs benchmark snowstorms to reach average to above average snowfall. Miller A Cutters west of the APPS and weak Miller Bs that dryslot Central PA aren’t good for our area or Central PA. At least we finally got a solid benchmark season here after so many below average seasons since 2018-2019. But our issue has been the dominance of all or nothing seasons since 93-94 where we finish well above average or well below snowfall. The mid range 18-29 season which dominated from the 1960s to early 1990s has become a rarity. So our snowfall seasons either hit some nice home runs or we strike out. The risk in a warming climate is that the strikeouts start to become more common than the home runs. But it’s still nice to know that we can get a great bounce back year like this one from time to time.

It’s interesting how we got a much warmer and less snowy version of 2013-2014 and the 2014-2015 the last two winters. This is what I was getting at in my discussions over the last few years. The cold pool and polar vortex over North America was much smaller during the last few winters with a more expansive and stronger 500 mb ridge. So Boston couldn’t challenge their snowiest winter in 2014-2015 with the February 2015 cold and the Great Lakes couldn’t approach 2013-2014 record snow and cold. The last few winters were a warmer and less snowy reflection due to the big global temperature jump which occurred with the 2015-2016 super El Niño.

I can see why the models are going so strong with the El Niño next winter. The last two winters followed the North Pacific strong El Niño precursor pattern. This two winter regime featured a strong -WPO in the Bering Sea and a ridge over the Western North America. But we will need to watch the El Niño development going forward to see if the El Niño is as robust as 2015-2016, 1997-1998, and 1982-1983. Probably need to get through the spring forecast barrier period before we have an idea about next winter. If the previous multiyear composite works out, then the ridge next winter will be centered just north of the Great Lakes into the Northeast. This progression below isn’t a forecast yet, but something to watch for if the El Niño becomes as strong as model forecasts. Plus the sample size only consists of 3 multiyear periods since 1981. 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 winter 500 mb composite 2014-2015, 2013-2014, 1996-1997, 1995-1996, 1981-1982, and 1980-1981 composites Roll forward to the 2015-2016, 1997-1998, and 1982-1983 winters

Yeah, I agree. It was significantly deeper than the Blizzard of 1888. Had March 1993 taken a benchmark track instead, then we would have had a 40”+ jackpot with 80-100 mph gusts somewhere in the OKX forecast zones and drifts approaching 6-10 feet high in spots. https://www.weather.gov/media/ilm/Overview_Kocin_Schumacher_Morales_Uccelini.pdf

That was the last time many locations near the coast had a 10”+ snowstorm after February with the exception of our local snow capital and nearby spots back in 2018. Maximum 2-Day Total Snowfall for NEWARK LIBERTY INTL AP, NJ After February Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. 18.2 1956-03-19 0 15.8 1915-04-04 0 - 15.8 1915-04-03 0 14.8 1958-03-21 0 13.9 1960-03-04 0 12.8 1982-04-07 0 - 12.8 1982-04-06 0 12.7 1993-03-14 0 - 12.7 1956-03-20 0 12.5 1960-03-03 0 12.1 1941-03-09 0 12.0 1941-03-08 0 - 12.0 1924-04-02 0 - 12.0 1924-04-01 0 - 12.0 1852-03-18 0 - 12.0 1852-03-17 0 11.9 1993-03-13 0 11.5 1896-03-16 0 11.0 1867-03-18 0 - 11.0 1867-03-17 0 10.5 1851-03-08 0 Maximum 2-Day Total Snowfall for ISLIP-LI MACARTHUR AP, NY After February Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. 18.4 2018-03-22 0 17.0 1967-03-22 0 16.0 1982-04-07 0 - 16.0 1982-04-06 0 15.0 1967-03-23 0 14.9 2018-03-21 0 13.5 2009-03-02 0

Some of the strongest backdoor cold fronts on record in the Northeast during the spring have occurred following record warmth. https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/us/ma/east-boston/KBOS/date/2002-4-17 PM 93 °F 51 °F 24 % W 18 mph 23 mph 29.83 in 0.0 in Mostly Cloudy 4:54 PM 93 °F 49 °F 22 % W 17 mph 26 mph 29.82 in 0.0 in Partly Cloudy 5:54 PM 91 °F 49 °F 23 % W 14 mph 0 mph 29.82 in 0.0 in Mostly Cloudy 6:32 PM 66 °F 50 °F 56 % NNE 26 mph 33 mph 29.87 in 0.0 in Mostly Cloudy / Windy 6:54 PM 59 °F 50 °F 72 % NNE 25 mph 35 mph 29.91 in 0.0 in Cloudy / Windy 7:54 PM 55 °F 49 °F 80 % ENE 7 mph 0 mph 29.95 in 0.0 in Mostly Cloudy 8:54 PM 55 °F 50 °F 83 % N 8 mph 0 mph 29.96 in 0.0 in Partly

We’ll see if the long range EPS is correct about the backdoor potential for later in the month as it has a return to some Greenland blocking.

Parts of Florida also experienced some snow following a record 80° day back in January. Climatological Data for Pensacola Area, FL (ThreadEx) - January 2026 Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. 2026-01-01 68 41 54.5 1.1 10 0 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-02 71 51 61.0 7.7 4 0 0.03 0.0 0 2026-01-03 74 58 66.0 12.8 0 1 1.47 0.0 0 2026-01-04 65 51 58.0 4.8 7 0 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-05 65 50 57.5 4.4 7 0 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-06 76 60 68.0 15.0 0 3 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-07 77 64 70.5 17.5 0 6 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-08 70 62 66.0 13.1 0 1 T 0.0 0 2026-01-09 75 65 70.0 17.1 0 5 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-10 80 62 71.0 18.1 0 6 0.19 0.0 0 2026-01-11 62 43 52.5 -0.4 12 0 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-12 52 36 44.0 -8.8 21 0 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-13 58 31 44.5 -8.3 20 0 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-14 61 45 53.0 0.2 12 0 0.10 0.0 0 2026-01-15 50 32 41.0 -11.8 24 0 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-16 65 30 47.5 -5.4 17 0 0.00 0.0 0 2026-01-17 59 44 51.5 -1.4 13 0 0.03 0.0 0 2026-01-18 49 32 40.5 -12.4 24 0 0.10 T RECORD EVENT REPORT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MOBILE AL 145 AM CST SUN JAN 11 2026 ...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE SET AT PENSACOLA... A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 80 DEGREES WAS SET AT PENSACOLA YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 79 DEGREES SET IN 1957.

It’s great that we got a one month relaxation of the Northern Stream from late January into late February. But now it’s back as strong as ever. This is the main reason that our significant snowfall chances have diminished after February.

The record high of 80° at Central Park was the earliest 80° day on record. First/Last Summary for NY CITY CENTRAL PARK, NY Each section contains date and year of occurrence, value on that date. Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. 2026 03-10 (2026) 80 - - - 1990 03-13 (1990) 85 10-14 (1990) 80 214 1945 03-20 (1945) 83 10-19 (1945) 80 212 1921 03-21 (1921) 84 09-30 (1921) 87 192 2021 03-26 (2021) 82 09-18 (2021) 84 175 1998 03-27 (1998) 83 09-27 (1998) 89 183 1989 03-28 (1989) 82 09-23 (1989) 81 178 1977 03-29 (1977) 81 09-19 (1977) 81 173 1985 03-29 (1985) 82 10-15 (1985) 80 199 2025 03-29 (2025) 81 10-07 (2025) 80 191 1917 04-01 (1917) 83 09-20 (1917) 84 171 1978 04-01 (1978) 82 09-21 (1978) 83

It will be interesting to see if this pattern continues into the summer with pieces of the Western heat coming east from time to time.

Many of the big snow piles melted up here. Now large pieces of broken curbs are being exposed that were plowed up under the snow. So we are going to need new curbs and pothole repair since the roads are in very rough shape. Also big piles of mud where the snow was as chunks of lawns were caught up in the plows. Hopefully we can get some more rain this summer as the grass went brown pretty quick last summer with the record heat and lack of rainfall. Reservoirs got recharged a bit this winter as they dropped to low levels here at times since September 2024.

How can you debunk statements which were never made in the first place? This was our first winter with benchmark KU events since January 2022. There wasn’t a statement made that we would never see benchmark storm tracks again. What was discussed was how long it would take for them to return and what mechanism would be involved. All it took was one of the earliest November stratospheric warming events related to the -QBO and record low sea ice. But such events aren’t well forecast much in advance. Record Western Pacific SSTs mean frequent MJO 4-7 phases but not always constant. This was our first successful MJO 8 event since January 2022. The NAO has frequently been connecting with the Southeast Ridge but not 100% of the time. In fact, the Southeast Ridge link up back in December with the -NAO worked in our favor with the strong -WPO to prevent suppression and deliver a snowy clipper. Record warm ocean temps mean the Southeast ridge has been dominant but intervals when it relaxes have occurred from time to time. Fast flow is an increasing feature as the planet warms. But we saw the first relaxation of this pattern for the blizzard in late February for just long enough for all the pieces to come together in years. Snowy Clippers were very infrequent prior to December and we finally got two great ones after a long hiatus. In reality what we have experienced has been a shift to all or nothing snowfall seasons since the 1990s. So our winters either swing for fences like this winter and and get a bunch of home runs or we strike out like the prior 3 winters. The sense of balance like we used to have with frequent 18-29”snowfall seasons prior to the 1990s has been lacking. So now it’s mostly under 20” or even 15” seasons and over 30”. The challenge with this type of regieme is that we need some exotic device to get the great snowfall outcomes like this winter with one of the earliest SSW in 75 years. We have been doing better than a place like State College which hasn’t had a great Miller A east of the APPS track in over 20 years. So they have been missing out with all the Great Lakes cutters west of the APPS and benchmark tracks which favor the coast.

Generally looks like the magnitude of any colder weather during mid to later March will be of a weaker magnitude than the warmth this week.

The usual warm spots in NJ have a shot at 4 consecutive days reaching 70°+ which is impressive for so early in the season.

The obvious difference between now and and 100 years ago is that the average winter temperatures were around 5.8° colder. So this winter was closer to the norm back then. Now a winter this cold is the exception rather than the rule. Monthly Mean Avg Temperature for NY CITY CENTRAL PARK, NY Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Mean 40.1 34.8 37.9 37.6 2025-2026 33.8 30.4 31.5 31.9 2024-2025 38.2 31.2 35.0 34.8 2023-2024 44.6 37.0 40.1 40.6 2022-2023 38.5 43.5 41.1 41.0 2021-2022 43.8 30.3 37.3 37.1 2020-2021 39.2 34.8 34.2 36.1 2019-2020 38.3 39.1 40.1 39.2 2018-2019 40.1 32.5 36.2 36.3 2017-2018 35.0 31.7 42.0 36.2 2016-2017 38.3 38.0 41.6 39.3 2015-2016 50.8 34.5 37.7 41.0 Monthly Mean Avg Temperature for NY CITY CENTRAL PARK, NY Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Mean 34.2 30.4 30.9 31.8 1925-1926 34.8 32.0 29.2 32.0 1924-1925 34.0 28.4 37.8 33.4 1923-1924 42.0 32.6 28.8 34.5 1922-1923 33.5 29.9 26.3 29.9 1921-1922 32.5 28.2 33.6 31.4 1920-1921 37.2 33.4 33.9 34.8 1919-1920 30.2 23.4 28.5 27.4 1918-1919 39.4 35.6 34.9 36.6 1917-1918 25.0 21.7 30.4 25.7 1916-1917 34.0 32.8 28.3 31.7 1915-1916 33.4 36.0 27.8 32.4

The EC-AIFS is most optimistic with 3 days starting next Monday potentially reaching 70°+ in NJ.

Hopefully, the EC-AIFS will score another win over the OP Euro like it has been doing all winter with the backdoor further north allowing the first 70s of the season for the usual warm spots in NJ.

The Nino 1+2 based RONI was much higher and is better correlated with the global temperature jump since early 2023 with the Nino 1+2 ONI peaking over +3. The global temperature rise around the 2023-2024 El Niño was of a greater magnitude than just using a Nino 3.4 based RONI. This may be part of the reason that the winter of 2023-2024 had the atmospheric response and North American warmth greater than past even stronger El Niños .Plus the warmth extending west of the Dateline set records for those regions also. So the totality of the warmth gave a weaker RONI reading in 3.4. It also highlights the weakness of relying on RONI for El Niños is a warmer world. As RONI seems to be more relevant when we get La Ninas due to the SST gradient between the WPAC and EPAC. We still aren’t completely sure why the warming started so much earlier in 2023 than any event without the El Niño warming lag that we got in the past.

The recent Euro forecast increase in El Niño strength is due to the model initializing the record February upper ocean heat content for a developing El Niño. But as always we’ll have to wait until we get past the spring forecast barrier in order to know the exact strength. If we do get another event near or over +2 only 3 years after the 2023-2024 event, then it would be a first. The unusual and record early warming in 2023 for a developing El Niño may have signaled a shift in the PCC near Nino 1+2 leading to faster warming and more frequent stronger El Niños.

Pretty impressive how the record ridge out West which began back in November is continuing into March. But the Northeast trough isn’t quite as strong as it has been. So it looks like a weaker reflection of the pattern in the Northeast at least. This corresponds to the typical backdoor pattern that we see in the spring.

I posted this in the main ENSO thread and CC forum. If we do see another stronger El Niño so soon after 2023-2024, then it may be another piece of the puzzle indicating that the PCC has shifted positive leading to the big spike in global temperatures since 2023. We probably need to get past the spring forecast barrier in order to know the details of how strong this one gets. It’s possible that the faster rate of warming since 2023 is related to a shift in the newly discovered PCC near Nino 1.2. Notice the current Nino 1.2 temperatures have warmed in recent weeks. The last El Niño in 2023-2024 also experienced earlier warming than past events as the Nino 1+2 warming was early also. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52731-6?utm_campaign=related_content&utm_source=HEALTH&utm_medium=communities Much recent work focused on whether equatorial Pacific cooling over past decades is driven by anthropogenic effects or arises from internally-generated climate variability, like the IPO. A definitive anthropogenic link to the recent trends would allow us to reliably predict a cooler tropical Pacific. As the tropical Pacific is known to be a climatic pacemaker, for (at least) the near-future this would mitigate global warming via ocean heat uptake and low-level cloud feedbacks. Instead, if the cyclic IPO dominates the recent cooling, we may expect a strong warming when it reverses. In support of the first possibility, we have identified an emerging climate change signal in the tropical Pacific across different observational datasets and we call it the PCC. The PCC has distinctive ocean-atmosphere dynamics that differ from those associated with the IPO. We further demonstrate that the recent trends during the satellite era, which have been the focus of significant attention, result from a combination of IPO and PCC. The emerging PCC SST trend pattern features a narrow band of cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific and warming elsewhere. Throughout this paper we have taken for granted the widespread assumption that the IPO is an internal mode of the climate system. However, while we worked to distinguish between the recurrent IPO-related decadal variability and the emerging PCC signal, we are open to the possibility that these two may have become coupled together by anthropogenic forcing. They have much in common: shoaling of the thermocline in the east, enhanced upwelling somewhere in the central-to-eastern equatorial Pacific and an enhanced zonal SST gradient across the equatorial Pacific. It seems reasonable to postulate that if the response to radiative forcing is the emerging PCC pattern seen here, then it could initiate coupled ocean-atmosphere feedbacks that favor a negative IPO state that also has an enhanced SST gradient24. This might explain why the most recent IPO swing has been extreme and robust (Fig. S1b). If so, this suggests that in nature forcing is projecting onto natural modes of variability, while it is not clear whether climate models can reproduce this behavior. A new perspective on how internal variability interacts with the climate change signal will be needed in future studies

With a little luck, the worst of the heat this summer stays to our West. But you can see the case for pieces of heat coming east from time to time. Developing El Niño summers after La Niña winters have sometimes featured the strongest heat out West. Looks like a bit of a continuation of the winter pattern with the strongest Euro heat signal out West like we saw with the record warmth there this winter. The spring forecast also suggests an active backdoor potential with the Northeast being the coolest relative to other areas

If we do see another stronger El Niño so soon after 2023-2024, then it may be another piece of the puzzle indicating that the PCC has shifted positive leading to the big spike in global temperatures since 2023. We probably need to get past the spring forecast barrier in order to know the details of how strong this one gets. It’s possible that the faster rate of warming since 2023 is related to a shift in the newly discovered PCC near Nino 1.2. Notice the current Nino 1.2 temperatures have warmed in recent weeks. The last El Niño in 2023-2024 also experienced earlier warming than past events as the Nino 1+2 warming was early also. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52731-6?utm_campaign=related_content&utm_source=HEALTH&utm_medium=communities Much recent work focused on whether equatorial Pacific cooling over past decades is driven by anthropogenic effects or arises from internally-generated climate variability, like the IPO. A definitive anthropogenic link to the recent trends would allow us to reliably predict a cooler tropical Pacific. As the tropical Pacific is known to be a climatic pacemaker, for (at least) the near-future this would mitigate global warming via ocean heat uptake and low-level cloud feedbacks. Instead, if the cyclic IPO dominates the recent cooling, we may expect a strong warming when it reverses. In support of the first possibility, we have identified an emerging climate change signal in the tropical Pacific across different observational datasets and we call it the PCC. The PCC has distinctive ocean-atmosphere dynamics that differ from those associated with the IPO. We further demonstrate that the recent trends during the satellite era, which have been the focus of significant attention, result from a combination of IPO and PCC. The emerging PCC SST trend pattern features a narrow band of cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific and warming elsewhere. Throughout this paper we have taken for granted the widespread assumption that the IPO is an internal mode of the climate system. However, while we worked to distinguish between the recurrent IPO-related decadal variability and the emerging PCC signal, we are open to the possibility that these two may have become coupled together by anthropogenic forcing. They have much in common: shoaling of the thermocline in the east, enhanced upwelling somewhere in the central-to-eastern equatorial Pacific and an enhanced zonal SST gradient across the equatorial Pacific. It seems reasonable to postulate that if the response to radiative forcing is the emerging PCC pattern seen here, then it could initiate coupled ocean-atmosphere feedbacks that favor a negative IPO state that also has an enhanced SST gradient24. This might explain why the most recent IPO swing has been extreme and robust (Fig. S1b). If so, this suggests that in nature forcing is projecting onto natural modes of variability, while it is not clear whether climate models can reproduce this behavior. A new perspective on how internal variability interacts with the climate change signal will be needed in future studies.