Winter 2025-26

[CAPE]

2 hours ago, Bob Chill said:

Pretty much thinking the same thing as @Terpeast and @CAPE. CFS has been mostly unwavering for months. EPS and cansips basically in the same genre. Progressive NS dominant winter = so-so in all departments. Bad luck=  disaster warm wet/cold dry cycles and good luck = a heater stretch or 2 with multiple events in compressed timeframes. 

Big events are possible in any winter and precip has trended up with dynamic storms because of reasons. No lr guidance is showing anything classic and I'm not expecting classic setups but you can never blanket write stuff off. Something nasty and dynamic is going to hit again one of these years. WDI keeps climbing every year too lol. 

Gut guess is this winter will be warmer than last winter (easy guess lol) and snowfall/frozen will probably end up at least in the barely acceptable department. 

Weak Ninas are typically the worst for our region for snow, but last winter proved decent snowfall is possible. First and foremost we need cold air, and the HL largely cooperated, most notably in the EPO domain. I cant worry myself over the PDO. It is what it is, and historically a -PDO correlates with cold ENSO, and visa versa. There are other things at play now that tend to keep it negative, but we wont get into that here. Hopefully, like last winter it at least trends towards neutral some. As I said in my post above, a key in how bad/good a Nina winter ends up is the orientation and exact location of the NE Pac ridge. If we get periods where it is poleward and located more over AK, we can get some cold to work with. Moisture and storm track are another story, and we need some luck with that.

[CAPE]

23 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

So much red 

Always the case with these Climate models. I don't pay much attention to the h5 height anomalies on these tools, more so the height lines and the flow. At the surface the depicted temp anomalies give a sense of where the colder air will be relative to avg. At least there is some blue! And its nearby.

[Bob Chill]

4 hours ago, CAPE said:

Always the case with these Climate models. I don't pay much attention to the h5 height anomalies on these tools, more so the height lines and the flow. At the surface the depicted temp anomalies give a sense of where the colder air will be relative to avg. At least there is some blue! And its nearby.

Same. I just look at the ridge/trough orientation and glean some thoughts on source region. As depicted continental cold will dive east at times.  That's the horse. Hopefully the cart bangs some precip into it when it matters. There could be a giant blob of blue heights in the Pac NW and we'd be better off discussing winter of 26-27 lol

[Maestrobjwa]

43 minutes ago, Bob Chill said:

Same. I just look at the ridge/trough orientation and glean some thoughts on source region. As depicted continental cold will dive east at times.  That's the horse. Hopefully the cart bangs some precip into it when it matters. There could be a giant blob of blue heights in the Pac NW and we'd be better off discussing winter of 26-27 lol

Hey at least we could check out early and just ignore this altogether till next hear, lol

But oy...it amazes me how the snow completely fell off after Jan 16. I had been under the impression that change in climo was more gradual...but it's like somebody flipped a switch in 16, and the clippers disappeared and so did some of our ways of getting snow. I get changing climo but I don't understand why it happened so fast. I wish someone would study what exactly happened that year and why every year since has done, well....what we've seen.

[Maestrobjwa]

Time for a new approach this winter: If any model run shows something that hasn't happened in 10 years...ignore it 

[Stormchaserchuck1]

2 hours ago, Maestrobjwa said:

Hey at least we could check out early and just ignore this altogether till next hear, lol

But oy...it amazes me how the snow completely fell off after Jan 16. I had been under the impression that change in climo was more gradual...but it's like somebody flipped a switch in 16, and the clippers disappeared and so did some of our ways of getting snow. I get changing climo but I don't understand why it happened so fast. I wish someone would study what exactly happened that year and why every year since has done, well....what we've seen.

We've had a really strong/consistent North Pacific High pressure pattern (-PNA), especially in February and March. It's a pattern, and is associated with cold-phase ENSO and PDO. The anomaly Feb-March 2018-2025, for a 8-year-consecutive period, actually breaks #2 on the all time anomaly list by +30%. Then in the Atlantic we have had 14 straight positive or neutral NAO Winters since 2011-2012. In that time, 18/18 Winter months (DJFM) with a NAO value >1.11 have all been positive [CPC]. We've had some -AO and -EPO periods during that time, which have delivered very strong arctic shots to the Midwest, but they have not been long lasting. Why is this pattern occurring? A possibility is the low sunspots 2003-2022, as that 20-year period had the lowest sunspots, since the 1800s. There might be a lag, so the strong rebound of Solar activity over the last 2 years may help change up the pattern going forward (my theory). We may also be in a decadal +NAO phase, which could last about 20 more years, just based on the wave fluctuations over the last 150 years. We also seem to be a the peak of a -PDO phase (cold ENSO-like), with October 2024 and probably July 2025 having the lowest monthly readings on record.. it could take some time to neutralize or change that long term state, which started in 1998. 

[Stormchaserchuck1]

The CANSIPS busted horribly on its July forecast from a 0.0 month lead, in terms of US temperatures. The Euro is a much better performing seasonal model, but I don't know when its monthly forecasts update. The Euro though performed really badly for last DJF, I'm surprised seasonal models don't do better.. they seem to heavily weight ENSO. The year before (23-24) the Euro kept showing cold H5 over the Mid-Atlantic for the Winter mean. We got almost no snow that Winter, and it was the warmest Winter on record for the CONUS. The -PDO/east-based El Nino analog composite for 23-24 worked very well, though.  

[Terpeast]

6 hours ago, Stormchaserchuck1 said:

The CANSIPS busted horribly on its July forecast from a 0.0 month lead, in terms of US temperatures. The Euro is a much better performing seasonal model, but I don't know when its monthly forecasts update. The Euro though performed really badly for last DJF, I'm surprised seasonal models don't do better.. they seem to heavily weight ENSO. The year before (23-24) the Euro kept showing cold H5 over the Mid-Atlantic for the Winter mean. We got almost no snow that Winter, and it was the warmest Winter on record for the CONUS. The -PDO/east-based El Nino analog composite for 23-24 worked very well, though.  

Euro monthlies come on the 5th of every month. 

[psuhoffman]

17 hours ago, CAPE said:

Weak Ninas are typically the worst for our region for snow, but last winter proved decent snowfall is possible. First and foremost we need cold air, and the HL largely cooperated, most notably in the EPO domain. I cant worry myself over the PDO. It is what it is, and historically a -PDO correlates with cold ENSO, and visa versa. There are other things at play now that tend to keep it negative, but we wont get into that here. Hopefully, like last winter it at least trends towards neutral some. As I said in my post above, a key in how bad/good a Nina winter ends up is the orientation and exact location of the NE Pac ridge. If we get periods where it is poleward and located more over AK, we can get some cold to work with. Moisture and storm track are another story, and we need some luck with that.

The PDO has a crossover effect on this. Unless we get a 1996 type fluke (very unlikely in the current PDO) a snowy winter is off the table. It’s going to be hostile. But how hostile matters. One of the biggest factors determining between a god awful or just meh winter will be the PDO. If it’s closer to -1 for the winter like last year we have a shot. If it’s hanging out around -2 to -3 we’re in trouble. But it didn’t really start to improve until around thanksgiving last year so we won’t know for a while. 

17 hours ago, CAPE said:

Always the case with these Climate models. I don't pay much attention to the h5 height anomalies on these tools, more so the height lines and the flow. At the surface the depicted temp anomalies give a sense of where the colder air will be relative to avg. At least there is some blue! And its nearby.

But it’s not just the models. Red is crushing blue in areal coverage at our latitude overall lately. And no it doesn’t mean we can’t get a snowy winter. But it does make them less likely. 

[JenkinsJinkies]

1 hour ago, psuhoffman said:

The PDO has a crossover effect on this. Unless we get a 1996 type fluke (very unlikely in the current PDO) a snowy winter is off the table. It’s going to be hostile. But how hostile matters. One of the biggest factors determining between a god awful or just meh winter will be the PDO. If it’s closer to -1 for the winter like last year we have a shot. If it’s hanging out around -2 to -3 we’re in trouble. But it didn’t really start to improve until around thanksgiving last year so we won’t know for a while. 

But it’s not just the models. Red is crushing blue in areal coverage at our latitude overall lately. And no it doesn’t mean we can’t get a snowy winter. But it does make them less likely. 

If we get a Niño for 26-27 and the PDO improves like it did last year could that be a legit shot for us to finally score?

[nw baltimore wx]

30 minutes ago, JenkinsJinkies said:

If we get a Niño for 26-27 and the PDO improves like it did last year could that be a legit shot for us to finally score?