Posts

John Homenuk

Record breaking warmth will return Christmas week

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I’m dreaming of a…Green Christmas? While there will certainly be no shortage of “White Christmas” puns in the weather headlines over the next week, the real story will be in the meteorological pattern evolving. The warmth we experienced over the past few days was impressive, and the warmth being advertised on medium range forecast models for the period around Christmas is arguably more impressive. Owing to a large trough in the West and Southwest United States, a large ridge is expected to build over the East Coast, pumping in much warmer than normal air once again next week.

Without any cold air source, or high latitude blocking, mild Pacific air can enter the region unabated. This is the same reason that record high temperatures were broken during the tail end of last week and this past weekend — southerly winds brought in mid and low level atmospheric temperatures that were highly anomalous. And it is likely the same reason that records will be broken in the period of time around Christmas.

Here’s how the pattern will shake down, and why:

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Miguel Pierre

Long Range: Warmth continues, when will the pattern change?

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Meteorological winter began two weeks ago — but winter itself still seems to be on a hiatus. Over the next few weeks, it appears the pattern will continue to be unsupportive of winter weather — and may further support record breaking warmth. Our long range outlook will discuss the meteorological pattern for the upcoming 30 to 45 days. With an in depth look into meteorological patterns and the developing global circulations, we’ll explain the processes occurring that will drive our weather pattern for late this month and January.

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Miguel Pierre

Monitoring the Stratosphere in November

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Well, we’d be wrong not to mention that we are all rejuvenating from releasing our winter forecast for 2015-16. We hoped you all enjoyed reading it –whether or not it was what you were hoping to hear. It took a lot of collaboration, research, and efforts between all of us here to put it together.

In the upcoming days, we plan for a series of technical posts for our premium subscribers to explore more on important topics from the winter forecast. For this post,  we discuss more about Stratospheric Warming.

There’s been a high volume of discussion within the weather community regarding snow cover extent over Eurasia, and it’s potential foreshadowing of Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) events, which may be correlated to a negative Artic Oscillation phase (-AO), 2 to 3 weeks thereafter.  According to the automated graph below, snow cover is now expanding and running close to 2009 at this time. As some of you may already know, the winter following that was featured colder than normal temperatures with above normal snowfall for December; and then same again in February. We also had a minor stratospheric warming in event in November, before a major SSW later in January and February.

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John Homenuk

In Autumn, many eyes drawn to the North Pacific

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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.

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