Am I missing something or is the Daily Newsletter lacking a Link to a text write-up today? All I am seeing are the maps.

Well, that certainly looks like a Retrograding Block to me, so maybe it works its way back further west than the models show right now in quicker fashion. Irregardless, it should eventually get back in a more favorable position at some point in the Week 3/4 timeframe.

I don’t buy the NAM. As a matter of fact, I usually don’t buy much of anything ran off the NCEP Suite of Model Guidance. Billions and billions of dollars spent and what we have here is a national embarrassment. End of rant

The European Model has historically had a bias towards holding back energy in the Southwestern United States. Accordingly, the European Model will sometimes diverge from the U.S. Model by being both slower to bring systems out of the Southwest and tend to phase those features with the Northern Branch and then lose the phasing, simply to bring it…Read More

Perhaps, the persistence of the PNA in the Negative Phase is because what has been a Semi-Permanent Ridge in the Southwest Atlantic simply doesn’t want to give up for the Winter. If true, the strength of any such Ridge in combination with the cold air surges brought down due to La Nina would dictate the outcome of the Winter in the I-95 Corridor.…Read More

Another possible explanation for the divergent results in the modeling from run-to-run could be an impending pattern change that the models are having difficulty resolving.

I would have to spend some time and research the correlations between “Dry” Octobers and the following Winters. But, if memory serves me correctly, I believe Octobers with below average precipitation usually are followed by Winters that are warmer than the 30-year average at that particular geographical location. Has anyone else out there done…Read More

I don’t believe MJO Phases 4, 5 and 6 are “Cold Phases” for the Eastern U.S. In the late Fall or early in the Winter, Phase 7 can result in some Eastern Cold and later in the Winter and early Spring, Phase 3 is a relatively Cold Phase. But, during the heart of Winter, it is Phases 8, 1, and 2 which produce the dips in the Jet Stream owing to the…Read More

Frankly, we are now getting very close to the point (about March 1st) where I really couldn’t care less about Winter weather. And, this is not a new point of view, I have held for decades now. Once, we get past the Holidays and January, snow and cold become increasingly a nuisance to be tolerated. The translation is – I am honestly not…Read More

Perhaps, the CFS Model is telling us that a substantial snow cover gets put down which acts to mute the impact of the relaxation of the pattern. So, at the upper levels, the pattern relaxes. But, at 2 Meters, we don’t get what MJO Phases 4, 5 and 6 might usually give us. If the MJO is rotating through quickly, we are back into the Cold Phases…Read More

Perhaps, looking at the SOI values from the Winter of 1977-1978 might yield some clues. As I recall, it was a weak El Nino and Central-Based. The Winter sort of spurted until 1/8/1978 and then took off for 60 days in grand fashion. I don’t know if Queensland has those daily values archived or if they were doing the calculations back then.

The truth is no two El Ninos are the same. It would be instructive to go back and look at the Winters of 1969-1970, 1972-1973, 1976-1977 and 1977-1978 and observe just how different those Winters were in both the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, including the I-95 Corridor.

It will shift east, shift east, shift east, but in the end, it will be coming back West by the time we get to the Friday and Saturday model runs because the GFS is almost always too far south and too far east from 4 to 5 days out.