December 2018 General Discussion & Observations
New month starts this Saturday, might start this thread now.
Looks to be a stormy and relatively mild first 5 days of the month, however it seems it would not take too much of a change to have one storm squash ridge enough, for the follow-up to be some amount of frozen. We shall see.
This morning, the SOI rocketed higher to +18.23. It has now been positive 36 out of the last 39 days. Despite the ongoing El Niño event, the December SOI average will very likely be positive. Since 1950, there were only 3 positive December cases during an El Niño event: 1965, 1968, and 1969. All three cases were followed by -10.0 or below January averages. All three prior SOI cases also featured severe Atlantic blocking (monthly AO average of -2.000 or below).
A look at the daily SOI and AO