Welcome back for year 20 and Happy Thanksgiving everyone !This November has featured some inviting, crisp cold air and a few dustings of snow which I hope has elevated everyone's anticipation for the upcoming winter. While we haven't managed to mimic the snowvember 2018 performance and we likely never will in my lifetime, New England has been ground zero for cold air this month and I am hopeful this serves as one of those atmospheric "tells". More on that later. For me, it's always just good to be back doing this for another season, skiing the mountain obviously but also hopefully providing some helpful intel as to the snowfall situation in the MRV.
El Nino announces a 2023-24 world tour !
2023-2024 brings a significant El Nino back as a headlining act. It is easily the most dominant player on the playing field and has been flirting with Super Nino status this fall. More on that in the next paragraph. This year's ENSO (El Nino) is throwing a knuckle ball at us this year and I am going to use that adjective to honor former Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield who passed away way too young early last month. So why is this pitch a little harder to pick up ? The Pacific Decadal Oscillation's (PDO) warm phase is often coupled with El Nino and without looking especially close, I was hopeful that the 4-year streak of negative or cool phase PDO's would abruptly end. Though the PDO has weakened in the past month, it remains negative putting the Pacific Ocean in a counter-intuitive state going into the winter. After an initial sense of dread, I started researching winter's with this occurrence and to my surprise, we've seen a few in the last 75 years and almost all of them, incredibly, have had very good results.
ENSO Specifics
Let's discuss the El Nino situation first. The anticipation of this ENSO switch has been an ad-nauseum topic going back to the end of last winter. In this case, forecasts have been largely accurate, the critical regions of the equatorial Pacific Ocean have warmed to nearly 2 degrees C above average which nearly places this ENSO in what I like to call "Super Nino" status. By way of comparison, this El Nino remains a little weaker than the last two big ones. The horror show of 2015-16 was 0.8 C warmer, measured in temperature and the decent snowfalll winter of '97-98 El Nino was half a degree warmer. Though I have a general affinity for El Nino especially for the east coast storms they tend to produce, this one is coming in a bit too hot for my liking. I would prefer to see the equatorial regions closer to 1 degree C above average since the adverse impacts of the stronger ones have often included month-plus stretches of super mild weather. More generally El Nino has a propensity to weaken the onslaught of arctic air on northern latitudes of North America. We've seen this anyway thanks to the impacts of climate change so there's certainly some cause for concern. To reiterate, the benefit of El Nino has to do with storminess and specifically the type of storms. The southern branch of the jet stream is energized and is capable of producing juicy east coast storms infused with both Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean moisture. I should mention that the inland runner problem, a seemingly invariable fixture of the recent -PDO / La Nino winters during the last World Cup cycle are not nearly as prevalent during El Nino. I am sure we will manage to drum up a few of those because we like to do that in Vermont, but the chances of going a month or more without one is higher than usual.
The PDO knuckler
So now lets move the discussion back to the PDO because as I mentioned, we've been dealing with a sea surface temperature configuration in the Pacific which is making it very difficult to sustain cold in eastern North America. No winter was that more evident than the last which saw a varying iteration of the same story with cold weather confined to the west and western ski areas while the east coat was fending off one onslaught of mild weather after another. Since the epic winter of 2018-19 which included that epic Snowvember, the PDO has been showing us one negative result after another. It's a much worse issue for snow lovers across southern New England and points south, but even at 43 N, it's been tiring playing defense against mild air week after week. I've gone over the warm phase / cool phase PDO state a few times so I'll provide a link here to a more academic definition and move on.
Can El Nino finally break the cool or negative phase of the PDO ? It hasn't yet ! There's finally been some evidence that the index is neutralizing at least anecdotally looking at this animation.
A positive phase consists of the horseshoe of relative warmth in Pacific Ocean SST's that, across the north, follows the outline of the west coat of North America all the way to Alaska. This has the benefit of weakening the mid-lattitude latitude potency of the Pacific jet stream and encourage a more favorable positive PNA structure to the jet configuration. Having not gotten to that positive or warm phase of the PDO yet, I would be inclined to believe that this year's ENSO will be of that counterintuitive variety I mentioned above.
My initial reaction to these developments wasn't positive, but upon further review the data appears quite encouraging. Yes, I have the cool/negative PDO fatigue but as former NBA player Rasheed Wallace once famously told a referee - "ball don't lie!". The cool/negative phase PDO is a problem for areas farther south during an ENSO but there are several instances over the last 75 years where we've been graced with this combination (ENSO/cool phase PDO) and almost all of them have been good interior New England snow years and a few of them have been the cooler version of El Nino. Here is the list which includes a surprising basket of really good years and only one bad one (1994-1995). 1972-73 might be the best comparison and it was infamous because of Philadephia which only recorded a trace of snow for the entire season. Vermont in contrast, has a terrific winter ! 2006-2007 is another really good looking similar year (not on the list because Nino was a little weaker) which had a horrible start, but produced 7 amazing weeks beginning in the latter half of January. Interestingly, El Nino years featuring the warm phase PDO have been memorable for the I95 corridor, but have featured very mixed results in Vermont and the horror show that was 2015-16. 1957-58 and 2015-16 were two of the worst winters in the history of MRG operations and both had the typical strong ENSO/+PDO distinction.
Snow/Ice expansion
Nothing extraordinary regarding the buildup of snow and ice in the northern hemisphere this autumn. The southern hemisphere made some news this summer for setting records for low sea ice in the antarctic region. The buildup of ice in the arctic is running well below what it would 50 years ago but appears relatively healthy relative to the last 10 years. One can play around with this interactive link to validate my assessment if you so choose.
Snowcover across the northern hemisphere appears very normal, chiming in at an 18.73 millions of square km for October which is slightly above the last two Octobers, but short of the big numbers we saw for several years prior to that. This number is well within a normal range however so the data can't provide many clues moving forward.
Additional clues ?
So while fretting about the strength of El Nino, I've also been watching closely to see if the atmosphere might be tipping its hand in another way and there are encouraging signs here as well. No longer has the west been hoarding the cold ! The recent World Cup cycle of cool phase PDO has left the east coast and New England specifically as the warmest spot relative to average in more months than I care to remember. This recent October was another example, but the recent summer finished magnificently with one of the best weather months in recent memory - August. We were the cool spot then and once again in November are likely to be one of the coolest locations in North America, a clear break from recent trends and a reminder that things like this actually do happen. I am also really encouraged to see the relative warmth in the Atlantic Ocean near the New England coastline subside. There is plenty of warmth in the Atlantic Ocean, don't get me wrong, and the oceans are making news for their warmth and will continue to do so, but at least this warmth is not, at the moment concentrated near us. This would certainly be a change from recent winters.
Blog content moves from "X" to "Threads"
Indeed, I've decided to move all the blog related content from Twitter/X over to Threads the offshoot of Facebook/Instagram. The Twitter account will remain active and alive with some weather stuff, news, music and last but certainly not least, a complaint machine for New York Mets baseball. The blog related stuff moves to Threads with the handle "singlechairwx" and the talk will be confined to weather and skiing in the MRV. Followers of the blog are fully encouraged to follow me on Threads, but I've considered it a mission to make the blog and information related to the blog available outside the social media ecosystem and that mission continues. All of the latest "threads" will be available to see on top of the blog. I'll avoid a discussion about certain reasons for moving content off "X" , but aside from those, I was encountering issues getting the feed to load automatically on the blog. Add to that were the randos hitting me up on the latest Crypto scam or other randos hitting me up for, well..... nevermind, but you get the point. Either way, I was always pretty impressed with how the Vermont weather and skiing community remained insulated from the toxicity that surrounds so hopefully we can build that up again on "Threads".
The Solar Eclipse on April 8, 2024
What would a seasonal outlook be unless I tried to forecast the weather almost 5 months from now. I can't obviously, but still excited about the solar eclipse next year. I am also here to report that many of the El Nino springs I've experienced have featured early spring months that are sunnier and warm relative to average. It makes sense if you assume weather might be confined to the southern part of the US eliminating the cloudiness across the north. I've never conducted any real study so this is purely anecdotal and I might add that I don't want the south to hog all the weather this winter.
Summarized 2023-2024 winter outlook
I've tempered my warm expectations for the winter because of the research suggesting it seems unlikely to go entirely that way. Still however, we have a big El Nino and those usually are milder than average as a whole. The last several El Nino's have been mild because of a 3-4 week horrific torch and I feel this to be the likeliest outcome. The '06-'07 and 2015-'16 El Nino both featured very warm December's and this appears a bit less likely this time looking at the current weather pattern going forward. The Rasheed Wallace "ball don't lie" says it will be snowy and I am going with it. The reluctance of the PDO to turn completely positive should help the interior at the expense of the coast and bring some really nice storms to Vermont and fewer inland runners. Temperatures as a whole will be above average by 1-2 degrees but snowfall will also be little above average depending on how it's measured. Admittedly, I remember taking a similar stance prior to the 2015-16 El Nino and face-planted off a covered bridge, but lets try this again since we have a decent sample size of data backing us. Hope to see you all on the hill and again, hope everyone enjoys their holiday.
1 comment:
You the man! Closely following your prognostications from the White Mountains of NH. Will start following along on threads. Pray for snow!!!
BTW it’s reassuring to hear about the normalish snow cover in the Northern Hemi. Glad the warm oceans aren’t having an outsize impact
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