2026-2027 Super El Nino

[BlizzardWx]

16 hours ago, Stormchaserchuck1 said:

Just letting you guys know, this was a >+1 PDO. The new thought in the weather community is that global warming is skewing PDO negative, etc, the warm pool near Japan isn't going away. While SSTAs are warmer, the PDO is a 50/50 index, and the big warmth along the west coast of North America was responsible for strong +PDO in 15-16. 

This is a good point because it may well be pretty similar to what we end up doing in the N Pac this winter, with warm water east of Japan AND along the west coast. 

13 hours ago, Stormchaserchuck1 said:

It's pretty easy not to have a bias. Accept that there is a 85% chance that the Winter will be above average wherever you are, but I think the Strong El Nino historical analog set is biased warm compared to that, with probably too much +AO/NAO. 

Yeah its a problem when we only want to use recent years as analogs yet all of those years are biased towards -PDO and +AMO. That won't work when we buck the trend. 

[40/70 Benchmark]

2 hours ago, LakePaste25 said:

It goes both ways. When some of us throw 97-98 into the mix, we aren’t saying the snow totals will repeat verbatim. Some of this is just random variability. 97-98 came extremely close to a producing KU’s a couple of times and could actually produce one if the general pattern repeated. So people shouldn’t freak out that their snow is being taken away when that year is mentioned. 

Absolutely, but the opposition to the cold side is more boisterous, as the cold contingent has been beaten into submission by CC. 

[bluewave]

18 hours ago, Stormchaserchuck1 said:

Just letting you guys know, this was a >+1 PDO. The new thought in the weather community is that global warming is skewing PDO negative, etc, the warm pool near Japan isn't going away. While SSTAs are warmer, the PDO is a 50/50 index, and the big warmth along the west coast of North America was responsible for strong +PDO in 15-16. 

The warm pool to the east of Japan began developing during the mid to late 2010s. It’s the first time the ocean there down to the subsurface has warmed this much in the modern monitoring era.

It’s appears to be due to the record 500 mb heights leading to light winds and clear skies allow the ocean below to warm. When we had the colder pool in the EPAC in recent years it lead to the record low -PDOs. In the old days the -PDOs were driven by mostly the cooler SSTs in the EPAC rather than the warm anomalies from Japan to south of the Aleutians. 

Most researchers avoid the term permanent and use persistent or new as a description. What would need to have happen to reverse this pattern would be for low pressure and strong winds to persist in this location with more clouds.

If this could be sustained for more than a few months, then there would be a shot at cooling the surface and subsurface. As long as the warm pool persisted off of California, then the PDO could transition to a more strongly positive level like we last saw back in 2015. 

Current model forecasts have this warm pool east of Japan persisting through December at the same time there is a warm pool off of California. So this effectively brings the PDO closer to neutral with overlapping warm pools from the West and East. 

Since these models aren’t the greatest for reliably beyond 8-15 days, we are just going to have to wait and see what the details will be. Plus they have missed the summer -PDO declines recent summers as the ridge to the East of Japan has verified much stronger than seasonal model forecasts. 

It appears that the subsurface reservoir of record warmth reaching to the surface has resulted in a feedback process between the ocean and atmosphere sustaining the pattern.

While it’s still very early in the El Niño process, the big increase in WWBs near and off the equator so far hasn’t had the stronger winds and lower pressures to the East of Japan and to the south of the Aleutians like the developing super El Niño 1997 had during the spring. We would want to see the westerlies increase to the east of Japan and south of the Aleutians especially by next winter to have a chance to begin to get the PDO into more of a positive state. 
 

 

 

 

 

[snowman19]

WWB time:

 

 

 

[GaWx]

30 minutes ago, bluewave said:

The warm pool to the east of Japan began developing during the mid to late 2010s. It’s the first time the ocean there down to the subsurface has warmed this much in the modern monitoring era.

It’s appears to be due to the record 500 mb heights leading to light winds and clear skies allow the ocean below to warm. When we had the colder pool in the EPAC in recent years it lead to the record low -PDOs. In the old days the -PDOs were driven by mostly the cooler SSTs in the EPAC rather than the warm anomalies from Japan to south of the Aleutians. 

Most researchers avoid the term permanent and use persistent or new as a description. What would need to have happen to reverse this pattern would be for low pressure and strong winds to persist in this location with more clouds.

If this could be sustained for more than a few months, then there would be a shot at cooling the surface and subsurface. As long as the warm pool persisted off of California, then the PDO could transition to a more strongly positive level like we last saw back in 2015. 

Current model forecasts have this warm pool east of Japan persisting through December at the same time there is a warm pool off of California. So this effectively brings the PDO closer to neutral with overlapping warm pools from the West and East. 

Since these models aren’t the greatest for reliably beyond 8-15 days, we are just going to have to wait and see what the details will be. Plus they have missed the summer -PDO declines recent summers as the ridge to the East of Japan has verified much stronger than seasonal model forecasts. 

It appears that the subsurface reservoir of record warmth reaching to the surface has resulted in a feedback process between the ocean and atmosphere sustaining the pattern.

While it’s still very early in the El Niño process, the big increase in WWBs near and off the equator so far hasn’t had the stronger winds and lower pressures to the East of Japan and to the south of the Aleutians like the developing super El Niño 1997 had during the spring. We would want to see the westerlies increase to the east of Japan and south of the Aleutians especially by next winter to have a chance to begin to get the PDO into more of a positive state. 
 

 

 Interestingly, since that WCS tweet was made on 5/28/26 showing the then latest WCS PDO (5/27/26) down at -1.40, then near a 6 month low, the WCS PDO has risen nearly 1 in just 25 days while El Niño has gotten much stronger to -0.48:

[BlizzardWx]

My numbers run slightly higher than WCS, and showing a rise back to around 0. Last year at this time we were tanking the value. In 2024 we were recovering somewhat after already tanking, but values were still much lower than now. 

In my mind its clear that things are really changing from where we've been the last 10 years. Yeah, maybe we aren't headed for a robust +PDO, but it feels like neutral to slightly positive could be in the cards. 

[michsnowfreak]

3 hours ago, LakePaste25 said:

It goes both ways. When some of us throw 97-98 into the mix, we aren’t saying the snow totals will repeat verbatim. Some of this is just random variability. 97-98 came extremely close to a producing KU’s a couple of times and could actually produce one if the general pattern repeated. So people shouldn’t freak out that their snow is being taken away when that year is mentioned. 

I agree 100%. But actually, at least 1 in here IS implying the lowest snow totals will repeat.

Analogs are a tool like models. You could have everything align nearly identical to a previous year and the weather will never be replicated verbatim. 

Assuming winter is mild overall, there will likely be some significant Fall cold shots and early snows here in the lakes, that is a very common strong nino trait.