Fountainguy97
Member
Well it didn't take too many days of summer to get me in the mood for fall/winter. I just worked up some preliminary analogs and figured this would be a good start to the VERY early look at winter.
Obviously we start with the ENSO pattern. After matching up a list of past ENSO patterns that evolved in similar time/fashion/magnitude I narrowed that down just by a simple comparison of the global SST's during those years. I came up with 6 years that fit a fairly similar to very similar resemblance to the June Global SST pattern of 2020. I left a couple outliers in just to keep it diverse should ENSO shift toward fall.
One major assumption I made was to look for weak la nina or cool neutral years that followed an el nino period. I excluded a few that went into strong la nina as thats likely not going to happen this year. I also left in a couple that actually went back into warm territory by winter.
So I loosely based this off the assumption that we are looking toward a weak nina or cool neutral. But left the option open to a trend back toward warm neutral.
Here is the current forecast for ENSO which we all know can change every second and are often completely wrong.
GLOBAL SST COMPARISON OF ANALOGS
Analogs: 92-93, 95-96, 03-04, 05-06, 10-11, 12-13
Purple zones are similar to 2020. Brown designates ENSO which mostly correspond to the way 2020 is evolving (some lag by a few months) Red is a zone that stands apart of the 2020 map. The older maps are more coarse so who knows how similar they truly are.
Anyway, in general these years all share some very similar global SST patterns.
One wildcard is the PDO region. A pretty good mix of + and - in here.
Numbers here for those interested. I've included the year before and after my analog year. So for examples since its confusing: the first group my analog is 92-93. I included 91 as the precursor year to help identify similar long term patterns. And each number is a month left to right from January-December. SO each analog is the middle row right number (before the solid line) and the first two numbers on the third row. This is the December-February period. This is similar for PNA and QBO.
QBO and PNA
I'm just going to throw the charts in here. They came out pretty similar. Obviously they don't need to be exact but this is a general idea of where these years went.
QBO its easy to see red numbers on the first line, blue in middle, red on bottom. Pretty similar progression. Not perfect.
Remember: typically a -qbo rising positive is the best for a cold winter in the east.
PNA: This is a wash. BUT several of these winters had a month predominately + PNA.
Remember: +PNA is our friend in winter (Ridge west US trough east US)
Hurricane Ace Comparison
A VERY interesting point in these analogs is how active all of them were. I promise the years had no meaning to me. I started just picking years off an ENSO graph that had similar curves and magnitudes and came out with this.
I'm skeptical of the hurricane activity to winter activity analog but some people live and die by it. SO if an active cane season = active winter we could have a great test of that this year IF we end up very active.
US temp and precip maps from analogs in next post
Obviously we start with the ENSO pattern. After matching up a list of past ENSO patterns that evolved in similar time/fashion/magnitude I narrowed that down just by a simple comparison of the global SST's during those years. I came up with 6 years that fit a fairly similar to very similar resemblance to the June Global SST pattern of 2020. I left a couple outliers in just to keep it diverse should ENSO shift toward fall.
One major assumption I made was to look for weak la nina or cool neutral years that followed an el nino period. I excluded a few that went into strong la nina as thats likely not going to happen this year. I also left in a couple that actually went back into warm territory by winter.
So I loosely based this off the assumption that we are looking toward a weak nina or cool neutral. But left the option open to a trend back toward warm neutral.
Here is the current forecast for ENSO which we all know can change every second and are often completely wrong.
GLOBAL SST COMPARISON OF ANALOGS
Analogs: 92-93, 95-96, 03-04, 05-06, 10-11, 12-13
Purple zones are similar to 2020. Brown designates ENSO which mostly correspond to the way 2020 is evolving (some lag by a few months) Red is a zone that stands apart of the 2020 map. The older maps are more coarse so who knows how similar they truly are.
Anyway, in general these years all share some very similar global SST patterns.
One wildcard is the PDO region. A pretty good mix of + and - in here.
Numbers here for those interested. I've included the year before and after my analog year. So for examples since its confusing: the first group my analog is 92-93. I included 91 as the precursor year to help identify similar long term patterns. And each number is a month left to right from January-December. SO each analog is the middle row right number (before the solid line) and the first two numbers on the third row. This is the December-February period. This is similar for PNA and QBO.
QBO and PNA
I'm just going to throw the charts in here. They came out pretty similar. Obviously they don't need to be exact but this is a general idea of where these years went.
QBO its easy to see red numbers on the first line, blue in middle, red on bottom. Pretty similar progression. Not perfect.
Remember: typically a -qbo rising positive is the best for a cold winter in the east.
PNA: This is a wash. BUT several of these winters had a month predominately + PNA.
Remember: +PNA is our friend in winter (Ridge west US trough east US)
Hurricane Ace Comparison
A VERY interesting point in these analogs is how active all of them were. I promise the years had no meaning to me. I started just picking years off an ENSO graph that had similar curves and magnitudes and came out with this.
I'm skeptical of the hurricane activity to winter activity analog but some people live and die by it. SO if an active cane season = active winter we could have a great test of that this year IF we end up very active.
US temp and precip maps from analogs in next post
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