bluewave

Some of the models show the severe drought shifting eastward into the Plains from the 2030s into the 2050s. But it would require the ridge east of New England shifting for us to get westerly winds from the Plains. I suppose a compromise could be possible with both ridges linking up and alternating westerly and southerly flow. But this hasn’t been the case in the last decade with more of a trough over the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley and inshore flow. Notice how these days the common summer pattern has been a ridge east of New England and over the West. But from 2010 to 2013 when we had all the 100° heat and westerly flow there was a ridge in the Plains.

Wayne, NJ to the west of Newark actually had a higher average maximum temperature than Newark did with more 90° days. So the heat wasn’t just localized to Newark. But Newark did lead with the 95° days though a few COOPs nearby were close. A local COOP had a higher max at 106° while Newark only made it to 105° that summer. Data for June 1, 1993 through August 31, 1993 Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. WAYNE COOP 90.1 Newark Area ThreadEx 88.9 NEWARK LIBERTY INTL AP WBAN 88.9 MOORESTOWN 4 E COOP 88.1 WOODSTOWN PITTSGROV 4E COOP 88.0 LITTLE FALLS COOP 88.0 INDIAN MILLS 2 W COOP 87.1 LAMBERTVILLE COOP 87.1 PEMBERTON COOP 87.0 BELLEPLAIN STA FOREST COOP 86.9 CRANFORD COOP 86.9 PENNSAUKEN 1N COOP 86.7 LODI COOP 86.7 1993 #90° days in NJ Data for January 1, 1993 through December 31, 1993 Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. WAYNE COOP 68 Newark Area ThreadEx 49 NEWARK LIBERTY INTL AP WBAN 49 WOODSTOWN PITTSGROV 4E COOP 45 MOORESTOWN 4 E COOP 44 LAMBERTVILLE COOP 41 TOMS RIVER COOP 40 95° days in NJ Data for January 1, 1993 through December 31, 1993 Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Newark Area ThreadEx 25 NEWARK LIBERTY INTL AP WBAN 25 WAYNE COOP 22 TOMS RIVER COOP 18 WOODSTOWN PITTSGROV 4E COOP 16 Maxumum NJ temoersrure in 1993 Data for January 1, 1993 through December 31, 1993 Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. PENNSAUKEN 1N COOP 106 NEWARK LIBERTY INTL AP WBAN 105 Newark Area ThreadEx 105 TUCKERTON 2 NE COOP 104 TOMS RIVER COOP 104 WAYNE COOP 104

The wild card will be what happens to rainfall to our west. Some of long range models shift the Western Drought into the Plains in the coming years and decades. This could potentially alter the more onshore flow we have been experiencing over the last decade. So in that case we would regularly see 10 or more days reaching 100° over NJ and 5+ on Long Island. But it would require the ridge east of New England shifting to our West. This is highly speculative since the current pattern we are experiencing has been different from that scenario. No matter how much the climate warms, we aren’t going to see many 100° days with onshore flow dominating.

Yeah, this is why other studies and the recent acceleration of warming are pointing toward higher climate sensitivity than previously believed. The 1.5C limit was always an unrealistic target for how fast we continue to burn fossil fuels. Unless something happens to slow this trajectory, we will be well on the way to +3C to +5C of warming. https://cpo.noaa.gov/scientists-find-cloud-feedbacks-amplify-warming-more-than-previously-thought/ Clouds play an important role in how much the Earth warms when greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide increase. However, scientists have struggled to determine whether low-level clouds in the tropics slow down or speed up global warming, creating uncertainty in climate predictions. A new study published in Nature Communications and funded by the Climate Program Office’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) program adds to the growing evidence that cloud feedback is very likely to amplify warming in the climate system, rather than reduce it. The study found that the impact of clouds in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, two areas where low clouds are especially important, is much stronger than scientists previously thought — 71% higher. It also ruled out the possibility that tropical low clouds could have a cooling effect to offset warming. These findings narrow the uncertainty around one of the biggest unknowns in climate science and enable more accurate predictions of how much warming we might expect. This work was possible thanks to new techniques that balanced conflicting data from different regions, giving clearer answers. The results show that Earth’s climate is likely more sensitive to rising carbon dioxide levels than many models have suggested. A stronger positive cloud feedback means faster and higher levels of warming. It also highlights the need to improve how climate models represent clouds, especially in tropical areas, to prepare better for the challenges of a changing climate. The investigators will extend the value of this study by developing and delivering a piece of software to NOAA that will diagnose issues with low cloud feedback in new versions of NOAA’s modeling systems. This will lead to improvements in NOAA models’ ability to capture appropriate levels of cloud feedback, and improvements in processes that lead to weather and climate prediction skill. In the early 2000s, climate scientists could not say with confidence whether clouds would mitigate or amplify climate change. Some hypothesized that clouds might work to oppose a significant portion of human-caused warming by reflecting more incoming solar energy back out to space, while others hypothesized that particular changes in clouds might magnify warming by trapping more energy in the atmosphere. In 2001, NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics climate model was one of only three that simulated the type of significant positive cloud feedback we now know is likely happening. The MAPP and Climate Variability & Predictability (CVP) programs are advancing cloud representation in climate models through ongoing funded projects. By studying tropical cloud processes and precipitation and improving how they are represented across scales, these efforts are strengthening predictions and providing a clearer picture of our climate future. Read the study »

It’s going to be a challenge for places like Newark to ever see 20 consecutive 90° days again with how wet the climate has become with increased summer onshore flow. Number of Consecutive Days Max Temperature >= 90 for NEWARK LIBERTY INTL AP, NJ Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Last value also occurred in one or more previous years. Period of record: 1931-01-01 to 2025-05-14 1 20 1988-07-29 through 1988-08-17 2 14 2010-07-16 through 2010-07-29 3 12 1995-07-24 through 1995-08-04 - 12 1972-07-14 through 1972-07-25 4 11 2012-06-28 through 2012-07-08 - 11 1973-08-26 through 1973-09-05 - 11 1953-08-24 through 1953-09-03 5 10 2022-08-02 through 2022-08-11 - 10 2006-07-27 through 2006-08-05 - 10 2002-08-10 through 2002-08-19 Data for NEWARK LIBERTY INTL AP, NJ Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. 1988-07-29 95 0.00 1988-07-30 99 0.00 1988-07-31 90 T 1988-08-01 91 0.00 1988-08-02 94 0.00 1988-08-03 93 0.00 1988-08-04 92 0.00 1988-08-05 90 T 1988-08-06 90 0.00 1988-08-07 93 T 1988-08-08 90 0.00 1988-08-09 92 0.00 1988-08-10 93 0.01 1988-08-11 97 0.00 1988-08-12 95 0.00 1988-08-13 98 0.00 1988-08-14 98 0.00 1988-08-15 99 0.00 1988-08-16 92 0.00 1988-08-17 90 0.05

Back in the drier climate era days we would often go more than 4 days with no rain. This is why the longest heatwaves occurred in those days. But late May has especially seen more blocking and cutoffs last 10 years or so. This makes it prime time for cutoff lows and frequent rainy intervals. It’s the primary reason we still haven’t seen widespread 100° heat this time of year yet. In a drier climate with less blocking the May 1996 record heat would have easily been surpassed. Monthly Data for May 1996 for Upton NY NWS CWA Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. NJ NEWARK LIBERTY INTL AP WBAN 99 NY MINEOLA 1 NE COOP 99 NY OCEANSIDE COOP 98 NY ISLIP-LI MACARTHUR AP WBAN 98 CT NORWICH PUBLIC UTILITY PLANT COOP 98 NJ PLAINFIELD COOP 97 NY LAGUARDIA AIRPORT WBAN 97 NY DOBBS FERRY-ARDSLEY COOP 97 NY MINEOLA COOP 97 CT STAMFORD 5 N COOP 97 CT IGOR I SIKORSKY MEMORIAL AIRPORT WBAN 97 NY PATCHOGUE 2 N COOP 97 NY PORT JERVIS COOP 96 NJ CRANFORD COOP 96 NJ JERSEY CITY COOP 96 NY NY CITY CENTRAL PARK WBAN 96 NJ HARRISON COOP 96 NJ TETERBORO AIRPORT WBAN 96

When I mentioned to Philly to Boston I was highlighting coastal areas closer to the I-95 corridor. These areas are naturally seeing a decline in snowfall first. Higher elevations in the interior Northeast have more leeway since they can still do well with a warmer more northward shifted storm track.

Go back to around 2013 and you will see that most years have at least some measurable rainfall on at least one of the Friday to Monday extended Memorial Day weekend days.

I don’t do extended snowfall forecasts for your area north of Boston. My statement on the declining snowfall is based on the region around NYC. But if you run the snowfall data back to the late 1800s, it shows a steady decline with ups and downs along the way. Plus if they measured snowfall the same way as they did before the 1990s, it would show higher totals prior to that and a steeper decline. Since snowfall in the old days was under measured by 15-20% due to less frequent measurements. NYC is moving into an era when the seasonal average snowfall will dip under 20” on a long term basis once we get into the coming decades. The last 7 years are a preview of the future. But we could see a bounce off the bottom of recent years before resuming the decline in the 2030s.

Hopefully, the cutoff for the extended Memorial Day weekend is more frontloaded to Friday into Saturday and moves to our NE on Monday.

Since this -PDO cycle only started in 2019 after the 4 to 5 year +PDO and super El Niño, not sure how you can make that statement after only about 7 years. But I suppose you could make the argument that in a new regime of shorter PDO cycling since 1999, a warming WPAC could load the dice for the -PDO phases lasting longer than the +PDO phases. Still have to wait and see if the recent Nino 1+2 warming isn’t the beginning of a shift back to more +PDO in a few years. But with all the warming since the 2014-2015 to 2017-2018 +PDO period, my guess is that it would be a warmer and less snowy version of those years.

My guess is that the Aleutian Ridge setting multiyear records since 2019 on an annual basis is a combination of factors with the warming from the earlier -PDO eras being an important factor. Sure the location has its origins in the PDO. But the magnitude and the SST warming underneath is a result of the rapidly warming oceans and rising 500mb heights. You can see how many magnitudes of order stronger this ridge is from the cold 1950 to 1976 -PDO era.

I was saying that the snowfall would be below normal again as early as last December when the Pacific Jet began beating guidance beyond 120 hrs out. We used to get KU snowstorms in the old days when the AO blocks were centered over the North Pole. But it doesn’t matter where the block is these days as it usually finds a way to link up with the Southeast Ridge. I also doubted those long range snowfall forecast last February as I was thinking the ridge would push the best snowfall axis’s further north which was what happened.

We shifted to an all or nothing snowfall pattern since the 1990s with all the average to above average snowfall seasons featuring KU Benchmark storm tracks. During the 1960s to early 1990s it was cold enough to get closer to average snowfall with a bunch of smaller to moderate events and no KUs. Moderate snowfall seasons closer to average were the norm of that colder 30 year period. Very few well below or well above average snowfall seasons. So having to rely exclusively on KU events over the last 30 years has lead to more well below normal seasons since 2018-2019 when the Pacific Jet has been so overpowering preventing benchmark dominant storm tracks. Having a 50-100 year concentration of benchmark tracks from 2010 to 2018 with so many record seasons masked this longer term trend since the 1990s. Once this anomalous pattern shifted, we were left with the well below normal background snowfall pattern with the exception of 20-21 around NYC and January 22 from Long Island into Eastern New England.

It was a very short-lived heatwave around NYC in 1936 as the overall summer wasn’t warm by modern standards.

It was much colder back in those days so the hugger tracks were often 3-6” instead of the 1-3” which have become the norm since 2019. There were also clippers with 3-6” and 4-8” snows which were common which dropped south of NYC. These days the clippers have become cutters due to the stronger Southeast Ridge pushing the storm track further north. Plus there were non KU Benchmark tracks at times with similar amounts. So there was a wider variety of ways to get near 20” or more since the storm tracks were much colder.

Recent studies have found that if the natural Grasslands weren’t removed, then there wouldn’t have been a Dust Bowl. But a typical drier pattern that has occurred over intervals of time in the past. None of the previous drought patterns produced that type of heat.The record heat was a function of the desertification brought on by the the land use practices during that era. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0810200106 Abstract The “Dust Bowl” drought of the 1930s was highly unusual for North America, deviating from the typical pattern forced by “La Nina” with the maximum drying in the central and northern Plains, warm temperature anomalies across almost the entire continent, and widespread dust storms. General circulation models (GCMs), forced by sea surface temperatures (SSTs) from the 1930s, produce a drought, but one that is centered in southwestern North America and without the warming centered in the middle of the continent. Here, we show that the inclusion of forcing from human land degradation during the period, in addition to the anomalous SSTs, is necessary to reproduce the anomalous features of the Dust Bowl drought. The degradation over the Great Plains is represented in the GCM as a reduction in vegetation cover and the addition of a soil dust aerosol source, both consequences of crop failure. As a result of land surface feedbacks, the simulation of the drought is much improved when the new dust aerosol and vegetation boundary conditions are included. Vegetation reductions explain the high temperature anomaly over the northern U.S., and the dust aerosols intensify the drought and move it northward of the purely ocean-forced drought pattern. When both factors are included in the model simulations, the precipitation and temperature anomalies are of similar magnitude and in a similar location compared with the observations. Human-induced land degradation is likely to have not only contributed to the dust storms of the 1930s but also amplified the drought, and these together turned a modest SST-forced drought into one of the worst environmental disasters the U.S. has experienced.

But it’s been a challenge to sustain a quality +PNA ridge with the overpowering Pacific Jet. In one scenario a piece of Pacific energy digs too much out West and pumps the Southeast Ridge causing a Great Lakes cutter storm track. The next repeating pattern has been the hugger storm track along I-78 to I-84 with too much energy out west pumping the Southeast Ridge just enough for a quick change from snow to rain. The 3rd common storm track has been too much energy coming into the Western US acting as a kicker trough suppressing lows to the south. So this fast Northern Stream of the Pacific Jet has been working against Benchmark storm tracks even with blocking patterns which used to produce KU events when we had daily -5 AO readings in the past Februaries.

Most of the February -5 AO daily events since the late 1960s produced KU events and not cutters within about 10 days of the event. So this is a recent phenomenon. I am saying to look at totality of the pattern for forecasting storms. Since the 500mb and Jet Stream nuances aren’t being reflected in the raw NAO values.

The mid-February period was nothing resembling a +NAO Arctic blocking pattern. There was a -5SD block over the pole which extended all the way to Iceland which is textbook -AO and -NAO. This is why the long range guidance was so snowy. The raw NAO index has been skewed by the much stronger EA patterns in recent years. So the pressures to the south haven’t been as low. The blocking to the north hasn’t been the issue. It’s been the expansion of the subtropical ridges both in the Eastern US and Europe. So the lack of a trough especially near Europe caused the NAO to register as a weaker negative than the -5 AO was able to register. So a function of the way the indices are calculated and not a lack of blocking to the north. The current batch of computer models aren’t able to handle these new weather regimes especially the further out the forecast gets. The long range very snowy model forecasts in February reflected the old patterns which did indeed produce heavy snows down to the I-95 corridor. They would have been correct in the past keying on the heavy snowfall potential with the strong blocking to our north. But as the forecast period approached the models corrected much stronger with the Pacific Jet and Southeast Ridge. This has been a repeating theme with the models not being able to see the Southeast Ridge and Pacific Jet intensity very well beyond 5 days or so. The model forecasts missed the further north Southeast Ridge and stronger Pacific Jet which pushed the heaviest snows down axis up into Canada with the record snows from Toronto to Montreal.

It’s going to be a challenge getting anything resembling dry summer heat here with so much summer onshore flow and high dewpoints. Seems like you could really enjoy a Las Vegas or Phoenix summer pattern. It’s a really beautiful part of the country if you can tolerate that kind of heat.

The high latitude blocking pattern this February was in no way hostile to snowfall in the Northeast. It was right up there with past Februaries which produced historic KU blizzards. The issue was the northward displaced storm track and record Northern Stream of the Pacific Jet. This is conjunction with the strong Southeast Ridge and warmth when the bock peaked lead to the record snows getting displaced closer to Toronto and Montreal. While it rained with 50s along the coast around NYC Metro.

Ambient 500 mb heights have been increasing unevenly with some areas like the Aleutian Ridge seeing more increases than other areas. Boston’s best winter for snowfall was the record +NAO December to March in 2015. So it was less about the NAO than the deep trough over the Northeast. The main reason that the -NAO patterns have been underperforming for us in the 2020s is the trough that used to be present near the Northeast has been getting crowded out by the expansion of the Southeast Ridge or WAR. So even during extreme blocking events like this last winter, the storms still cut through the Great Lakes with a -5 -AO. The -5 AO back on 2-15-25 also extended eastward over to Iceland. So it should have also registered a strong -NAO also. But maybe the higher heights further south closer to Europe affected the calculation. So the lack of a KU blizzard around 2-15-25 was more about the storm track through the Great Lakes and Southeast Ridge link up than it was about the blocking near Greenland and Iceland.

Ensembles continuing with the slow moving cutoff theme for the extended Friday to Monday Memorial Day weekend.

That’s why this goes beyond the PDO and ENSO. We didn’t used to get these mega Aleutian Ridges and Southeast Ridges during -PDO and La Niña intervals of the past. Plus we are getting new patterns coinciding with the marine heatwaves from the Western to Central Pacific leading to historic 2nd EOFs of the PDO. This is why the ENSO and PDO events of recent years are behaving diffferently and creating different sensible weather patterns for us. The much stronger Northern Stream of the Pacific Jet has shifted the winter storm track through the Great Lakes. So this has created the record low snowfall pattern for us since 2019.