2025-2026 ENSO

[snowman19]

10 hours ago, MJO812 said:

You have been saying this since November.  You will eventually be right about the warmup but not anytime soon.

You’re funny. You’ve been declaring the La Niña dead and buried since December. Ever since you made your arrogant “You know the Niña is dead?” post just over a week ago, it’s been doing nothing but strengthening, strongest of the entire event actually….the SOI is up to almost +28 today, there was a big EWB, region 3.4 is still at -0.8C (dropped to -0.9C a few days ago) and it looks healthier than ever in region 3.4 on the new SST charts. Keep up the great work!

[bluewave]

21 hours ago, so_whats_happening said:

I applaud you for taking the advice and using a single source for both. I still don't like the SSTA-Global map but that is of my own.

Do you happen to have the site to see the depth of the warmth within this region or is that just a twitter thing?

I do find this year interesting even though we are in the Nina like atmospheric pattern/ base state it is not typical for us to see systems (in this particular pattern) going up the coast with little affect from a SER feature especially since we are entering mid to late January. This would and should be a time period where we see systems running right into the lakes almost similar to the a few days ago but over the next week and change we look to have this Nino like pattern evolve something is just off about this year so far.

The -PDO is 100% responsible still for the lack of precip in the east and SE how long that lasts will another interesting thing to watch over the next couple months. I personally would have thought by now we would at least be touching near average monthly precip totals.

It’s how this particular flavor of -PDO since the 2018-2019 rapid warming east of Japan and south of the Aleutians is manifesting. Sure this wasn’t the strongest La Niña that we have ever seen.

This new flavor of -PDO defined more by the warmth east of Japan and eastward than the cold off the West Coast resulted in the historic snows by a very wide margin in Juneau, Alaska with the very strong Pacific Jet undercutting the -WPO and helping to reinforce the -PNA.

The Northern stream has been so dominant that the East Coast storm track has been forced to the south and east away from the 40/70 benchmark which has been a common occurrence since 2018-2019. All the kickers coming in from the West in the fast flow have lead to poor wavelength spacing. So the KU benchmark snowstorm track hasn’t able to get going. 

The record warmth and dry conditions from the West into the Plains south of the Pacific Jet has also been very impressive. Probably related to the configuration of marine heatwaves across the Pacific and possibly the Atlantic and Indian Oceans also. 
 

Enhanced Northern Stream and weakened Southern Stream since December 1st

 

Snowiest Decembers Time Series Summary for Juneau Area, AK (ThreadEx) - Month of Dec
Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending.

1	2025	82.0	0
2	1964	54.7	0
3	1975	51.0	0
4	1991	49.3	0
5	1979	48.4	0

20 hours ago, SnowGoose69 said:

Didn't 23-24 mostly just fail because the El Nino was too strong?  Historically 1.5 or 1.6 is about the furthest you can take them or the whole country tends to pretty much torch.  I think 82-83 and 97-98 had alot of SER issues at times because the Aleutian Nino vortex just becomes so expansive it leads to a trof out west or in NW Canada

But the seasonal forecast models correctly forecast the strength snd still had the Nino trough forecast into the East. Due to the record WPAC warm pool for such a strong El Nino, the Canadian +PNA ridge was much stronger and displaced into the East. So the forcing had a further west lean into the Pacific than we normally get during El Niño. So there were Nino-like and Niña-like elements which blended together that winter. 

[PhiEaglesfan712]

6 hours ago, SnoSki14 said:

Really emphasizes that when things get warm they shatter records and the opposite side is only average to modestly BN at best. 

Yeah, the last time the west was record warm (in 2014-15), at least there was an easy explanation: It was a strong +PDO winter, with a warm neutral/weak el nino. Easy to see in that configuration why you would get a record warm west and a well below average east.

With the current configuration (-PDO/-ENSO/-IOD), there really is no reason why the west should be breaking their 14-15 records. You're not going to get anywhere near record cold in the east (like we did in 14-15) with that configuration.

[SnowGoose69]

3 hours ago, PhiEaglesfan712 said:

Yeah, the last time the west was record warm (in 2014-15), at least there was an easy explanation: It was a strong +PDO winter, with a warm neutral/weak el nino. Easy to see in that configuration why you would get a record warm west and a well below average east.

With the current configuration (-PDO/-ENSO/-IOD), there really is no reason why the west should be breaking their 14-15 records. You're not going to get anywhere near record cold in the east (like we did in 14-15) with that configuration.

Yeah makes no sense at all for the west to be torching like this in this type of winter.  But as we have said in here we've seen the east torch in El Nino setups recently in oddball configurations.  Dec 2015 was one, that was likely more due to the MJO being record strength in phase 5 or 6 though.

[GaWx]

 The largest DJF 2 day drop of the EPO down into a -EPO was 367 (2/9-11/1996) followed by 364 (1/16-18/61). There’s a slight chance these are exceeded 1/14-16/26. We won’t know until Mon (reporting lag). If they aren’t exceeded, it would have a good chance to end up 3rd biggest drop (300+). The 1/14 EPO was +88. So, to get the record drop, the 1/16 would need to go <-279.

 This isn’t a measure of the strongest EPO ridge but rather it’s a measure of the fastest developing one.

Records go back to 1948.

https://downloads.psl.noaa.gov/Public/map/teleconnections/epo.reanalysis.t10trunc.1948-present.txt

[EastonSN+]

[raindancewx]

We're entering the part of the pattern now that can produce snow and ice storms in the Southern Plains. My window for that was 1/15-2/15 this winter, its part of the cold retrogression into the Plains from the East. You can see the models starting to pick up the potential for these systems in the long range now.

That's pretty much how I imagined it - big highs western Canada, storms moving east via Utah, picking up STJ energy as the La Nina dies.

[40/70 Benchmark]

6 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

There actually is an emergent signal already....maybe it gets abandoned at some point, but this should ultimately grow.