tennessee storm
Member
Sorry change topic some... Eric. What’s your early thoughts on the severe weather season up coming... that’s what I’m slowly starting to focus on moving forward... though I take a late winter storm...
0z GDPS & 6z FV3 both have Ice in western NC Sunday night into Monday. 6z GFS says to warm in NC CAD. Euro has wedge but I cant see if there would be any precip or not. Outside of that continue to enjoy spring rest of the week lol. Another 8-10 days of this weekend weather the Fescue will be awake along with all the chickweed and wild onions etc. Then we can add another month of mowing to the 2019 season!
This is the classic look in the Eq Pacific we’ve seen in the satellite era when a legitimate El Niño is about to begin where most El Niños started in the central Pacific before migrating east as they intensified. The anomalously warm surface water near the international dateline is tightly coupled to and reflective of the downwelling oceanic Kelvin Wave that’s going to intensify the next several weeks as it comes east.
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It's going to be interesting to see how the Nino evolves and how the SST's respond to the Kelvin wave mentioned. I'm not convinced yet that it will strengthen over the coming months, most of the models are indicating it will remain steady or gradually weaken this spring/summer. Of course as we know the evolution of La Nina and El Nino can be pretty tough to predict; if we do degrade into a neutral state in time for hurricane season that would be bad news.
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I wouldn't (& I personally don't) pay much attention or give much credence to NWP model forecasts of ENSO at this time of the year because they are typically atrocious until they're being initialized w/ SSTAs in the east-central Pacific near the equinox, hence the spring "predictability barrier". We're clearly moving in a direction that favors stronger +ENSO later this year & the base state as is was already on the cusp of being an El Nino.
The next few months will be key but I'm not convinced yet we will see one form. The NWP model forecasts in February of 2018 did an excellent job of predicting the Nino that we saw develop. It's pretty tough though to know how things will shake out, just putting it out there that these models are showing a decline for 2019 to a neutral state just in time for hurricane season which would be very bad.
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Last year was one of the few times the forecast was reasonable at this lead, I wouldn't use this one example to try & inherently broad brush the models as remotely reliable before the early spring because most times they rarely are. Also keep in mind however the models already initialized w/ conditions in January while the IRI is still stuck in December on the first plot you showed which isn't exactly apples-apples.
Fading to neutral ENSO alone wouldn't be very bad, it's only one piece of the puzzle for this hurricane season, to suggest it would mean we could be in trouble ignores the initial state in the Atlantic and interannual tendencies in EP TC activity both of which don't favor as many TCs in the Atlantic. Not to mention the large-scale steering pattern is still tbd
I'm not trying to broad brush the models I'm just stating that they were pretty good last year for predicting the outcome we saw. Fading to neutral ENSO for hurricane season is one piece of the puzzle but it can definitely help with providing a more favorable environment for TC formation whereas a weak to moderate El Nino would likely produce more of a hostile environment.
there is always a warmup in mid winter...that's just one snapshot at one time
Ok? The Euro also nailed Sandy, but that doesn't mean we should automatically flock to it in every subsequent situation w/o looking at the circumstances at hand or realizing how the models do in other cases because base state initialization, i.e. whether or not we're starting in an El Nino, Neutral ENSO, or La Nina significantly effects NWP forecast skill. You were also clearly broad brushing the implications of ENSO wrt the hurricane seasonal forecast in saying that fading to neutral "would be bad." because aside from the fact that it's pretty subjective it also ignores a bunch of other factors that define how one perceives a hurricane season to be "good" or "bad". Conditions may not be any less hostile without a weak or moderate El Niño
We just have to pray this is wrong
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