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Mountain West Discussion


Chinook

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If the forecast for the next 6 days holds true, DEN will wind up at #5 warmest (about +5.1 F) and just outside the top 20 driest Octobers. I've never seen Mt Evans snow free anywhere close to this late in the fall. I'm starting to wonder if we should not make that expensive Christmas week mountain condo reservation after all.

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This is a bad start to the snow season for the high country. GEFS mean temperatures show above normal temperatures on days 1-15 for us. In regard to my post on the OK/MO/AR thread (the thread which I call "Oakmoor" in my own mind), I always hope the CFS is wrong when it shows above normal temperatures.  In the last couple of years I learned not to trust the CFS as an accurate climate forecast for my neighborhood.

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My view is that w/ El Nino dead, the MJO means you can expect seasonally adjusted repeats of patterns from earlier in the year. To me...this is the July pattern once again. Very warm, very dry. Thing is...it all broke in August, especially for precipitation. But overall, I think it's pretty warm in the West through Dec. A lot of my analogs are pretty cold in NM/CO in Jan/Feb - but the Central Tropical Pacific needs to stay colder than the Eastern Pacific for us to get near normal precip. Going to be very dry otherwise. One thing this winter has going for it is that the long dry periods should eventually translate to some very cold nights, which means any precip coming in at night will be very efficient, low water value snow.

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10 minutes ago, mayjawintastawm said:

Broke record high at DEN by 3 degrees today (83). If we go till 11/3 with no precip (likely), the four month period ending 11/3 will have 1.07 inches of rain. In four months.

That is pretty insane. Since 1892, at various weather stations, Albuquerque has always had at least 1.4 inches of precipitation from July 1 to Oct 31...and we're a (high) desert. We've had ~1.8 inches of precip since Sept 1 here, ~94% of normal. Even though Nov should still be fairly warm in much of the West, I do think it's closer to normal than Oct (this is a top four Oct here for warmth), and a lot wetter.

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The local NWS pointed out that the sunport has only had four years when first low of <=40F came in November. Those years are 1950, 1963, 1987, and 1988. Those years are pretty notorious for some big late snows in the West.  ABQ averages ~6" snow from Jan-Apr, but each of those four cold seasons (1951, 1964, 1988, 1989) had 7-13 inches of snow from January to April - +20% to +100% of normal.

It's interesting that

a) 1950 had a huge flip in the AO from Sept to Oct, as this year has

b) The ONI averages out to -0.18 for those four winters (DJF) - not too dissimilar to this year even with two El Ninos in there

c) 1988 followed two El Ninos, 86-87, 87-88, like this year

d) All four years were pretty warm Octobers nationwide

Snow anomalies disfavor snow in parts of the MW & NE, favored in parts of the SW & SE

vGVvHJq.jpg

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I recently found some high-resolution wind information on this web site

http://www.nrel.gov/gis/wind.html

The areas east of the Medicine Bow Range, Laramie Range, and Front Range have the highest wind speeds. The area northwest of Cheyenne (and near Cheyenne) has the highest average wind speed of any populated area in the lower-48 states. I had a suspicion that this was true.

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Any of you know Larry Cosgrove? His cold season (Nov-Mar) forecast is out. It's interesting - he gives 13 analogs based on a variety of matches.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/weatheramerica - you don't have to be a member to see it.

He has two of the top years all time for Albuquerque as weak analogs - 1959 and 2006, but they are heavily weighted down by bad years like 1995, 2012, and a few others. His combo of years has the West pretty cold in January after a warm start Oct-Dec, which is similar to my thinking. I diverge with him after though. One thing I like is he picked some of the warmest years in the AMO's warm cycle, but not just recent years

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79/52 at DEN today, +21, so for the month we ended up at +7.2 give or take a tenth, #2 warmest Oct. all time. Wow. Hard to get +7 for a whole month anytime. Looks like we tied a record high and set a record high minimum on the same day too, and two days ago we also set a record high and a record high low. 

 

You can start that winter thread around about December 10th I think...

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record warmth in Denver

It appears that yesterday (10/31) was 79 degrees, breaking or tying a record for the day. NWS Denver/Boulder tweet says that it was the 4th warmest October in Denver's history.

--

RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DENVER/BOULDER CO
102 AM MDT SAT OCT 29 2016

...RECORD WARM HIGH AND LOW TEMPERATURES SET AT DENVER CO...

RECORDS FOR BOTH MAXIMUM AND MINIMUM TEMPERATURES WERE SET IN DENVER
ON FRIDAY. THE HIGH TEMPERATURE WAS 82 DEGREES WHICH BROKE THE OLD
RECORD OF 80 SET IN 1994 AND PREVIOUS YEARS. THE LOW TEMPERATURE WAS
55 DEGREES. THIS WAS THE WARMEST LOW TEMPERATURE ON RECORD FOR THE
DATE. THE PREVIOUS WARMEST LOW FOR OCTOBER 28 WAS 52 IN 2001.

THE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE FOR OCTOBER THROUGH THE 28TH IS 57.6
DEGREES. THIS IS 5.9 DEGREES ABOVE NORMAL. IF THIS NUMBER STAYS THE
SAME THIS WILL BE THE FOURTH WARMEST OCTOBER IN DENVER HISTORY.

 

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Some of our El Nino winters have favored more snow for southern Colorado (and possibly central Colorado) and some of our La Nina winters have favored more snow in northwest Colorado. On a similar note, areas around 40 degrees north latitude are kind of on the borderline with El Nino impacts and La Nina impacts.

A weak La Nina doesn't give us much of a signal for ENSO-type outlooks, so maybe the north Pacific SSTs (PDO-based outlooks) and development of arctic air in Canada are the things that will give us a better picture of the month-to-month differences.  As far as the Pacific goes, a lot of the SSTs have become normal, 500mi west of San Fran and Portland, while the Gulf of Alaska area above 51 north is still pretty warm. I am not great at understanding the PDO factors, but the "blob" at 45N, 140W seems to have shifted.

In the next 3-4 weeks, I imagine that the warm temps will persist on average until we see a much colder air mass (10-20 degrees F) develop in Alberta.

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22 hours ago, Chinook said:

 

It appears that yesterday (10/31) was 79 degrees, breaking or tying a record for the day. NWS Denver/Boulder tweet says that it was the 4th warmest October in Denver's history.

 

Ha, silly me, the temp dropped at the airport a lot between trick or treating and midnight on the 31st so the official low for the date was 45 (at 11:59 PM) not 52. So tied for 4th instead of 2nd. Big daily departures can make even a few hours matter. Sheesh. Still, 4 record highs in 5 days (27,28,29,31) is impressive.

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It's kinda hard to get arctic air build up in central Canada when it is 18C above normal. This is a pretty ridiculous sfc-850mb temp anomaly averaged over North America!

wUgAkHk.png&key=0c024ab316eba2ed9fe3b506dc057ad41db3694d98c9660dbd3f89aaab119803



Is there any sign of this easing up later this month? Just curious when things will get back to normal around here


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About 1/2 of North America's land area will be >1.5 standard deviations above normal sfc temp on 11/5 (time frame of what I posted above.)

Some of the recent runs of the GFS are hinting at a change to below normal in the 324 hr - 384 hr time frame.  If you have to go past 240 hr to find the weather you want, it's kind of a bad situation.

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Once it begins raining/snowing over the West/South the cold will build - will be much harder to send warm air up to Canada/Siberia or the Arctic. Still like Nov as a wet month in the US south of 37N - that should blunt much of the heat north & east of the Rockies. Albuquerque is 5,300 feet above sea level and it was 85F in late October - that type of heat migrating out of the West into the plains & Canada will stop once we get significant rain. The rain seems to be coming now (Accuweather has 2.1"...rain(!) in ABQ on Friday, which I don't buy).

Don't really think the cold will get locked in any one place this year, will just slosh around. The incredible dryness in parts of the country, with the cold moving may eventually lead to some very cold nights and much lower temps once snow is actually established in the US. But for the SW (NM/AZ/TX) I don't think it comes til January, likely a bit earlier in CO/UT/WY. Also tend to think later in the winter there will be a lot of low water content snow, which will last longer than wet snow would in the mountains of CO/NM/AZ.

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With California cold & wet in October while most of the US roasted and had near normal precipitation, their snowpack is actually pretty good right now. Colorado is notably low, with New Mexico recovering a bit in the past couple nights due to the upper level low.

http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/ftpref/data/water/wcs/gis/maps/west_swepctnormal_update.pdf

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