In Autumn, many eyes drawn to the North Pacific
With Autumn very obviously and officially underway (have you been outside the past few days?), the questions have begun to surface regarding the upcoming winter — and if the Autumn pattern will foreshadow it. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite as simple as “A cold October means a cold winter” or ” A warm November means a warm winter”. If that were the case, we’d have long range forecasting figured out by now, and there would be much less urgency to winter outlooks. The best we have for now are correlations, analogs, and pattern drivers. When used together, the summation of these factors provide a higher probability of success in medium to long range forecasting. But these methods are far from perfect. The evolution of these different atmospheric oscillations during the autumn season can often give us substantial clues into the ensuing winter’s dominant index modalities.