This is what happened. I had seen the charts showing temperature anomaly patterns for each MJO phase. When I had some time and since love analyzing wx stats, I decided that it would be interesting to see how ATL actually did for each phase in winter.
I knew the left phases tended to be cold and the right phases mild. But I wanted to know how cold and how mild. So, I started off just looking outside the circle by phase.
As I was going along, I noticed a strong warm bias with these 600+ days. I noticed that phases 4 & 5 were quite warm as one would expect but what confused me was that the remaining phases were near normal with no phases averaging cold! That's when I figured out that inside the COD is where many of the cold days must be hiding.
Then I analyzed inside COD days and discovered that inside is, indeed, where most of the coldest days were! Also, I then learned that inside the circle is also within the 8 phases (think 8 pie slices). So, when you see a map showing a cold SE phase 8, for example, the cold average is largely being carried by inside the COD phase 8 though just outside there was also cold.
By the way, every phase came in colder when inside vs outside and even phases 4-5 inside the circle averaged near normal. The remaining 6 phases inside averaged colder than normal with inside 7 & 8 coldest.
