Winter 2018/2019 - General Discussion

Artane2002 wrote: »

I decided to reread his winter outlook from last year and I was amazed by how accurate it was considering it was a long range forecast. He nailed the January stormy periods that he predicted, which is the part I found the most amazing because he gave exact dates from 2 months out! I'm going to take a look at more of his winter LRFs.

I think you will enjoy his Novermber 2010 long range outlook. He and the UK Met office were confident that a very cold period would develop a couple of weeks before it happened.

Don't think I've ever been so excited coming into winter MT!!! :-)

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

Very impressive summer forecast for 2018 from MT in the post just above his winter post. First posted in May. Very accurate.

Thanks, but as I mentioned in the net-weather discussion, it seemed like a lot of people were expecting a very warm summer after the March blocking episodes, so I didn't feel like the summer forecast was anything extraordinary. Like (the sports of) diving or gymnastics, I guess there's a degree of difficulty factor in play, this winter (early) forecast certainly has a higher degree of difficulty, and I may want to revise the outlook around late November if I don't see good early signs of the set-up required.

As a sign of how unusual the synoptics are, the degree of cold in central regions of North America has been getting a lot of public attention, and yesterday Denver (not New Denver BC where I now live) -- Colorado -- had temperatures below freezing all day and 3 inches of snow. That was very early for such an event, especially the below freezing part of it. And even down in Phoenix, the temperature anomaly has switched from a large positive in September to a very large negative by their standards, days have been in the 70s instead of the normal low 90s F most of this month. This large cold pool has now worked its way southeast to the Atlantic coastal regions too, in modified form. One thing I want to assess in November is how strong the jet appears to be coming around the base of this persistent trough and what portion of it is heading north instead of northeast. This may help in working out whether we're looking at some sort of late 2010 all-before-New Years sort of response or something a bit more prolonged that may not start up in such a dramatic fashion. I think most people here would take either/or on that one.

M.T. Cranium wrote: »

and yesterday Denver (not New Denver BC where I now live) -- Colorado -- had temperatures below freezing all day and 3 inches of snow. That was very early

Watching the NFL Redzone on Sunday, they showed the Broncos stadium before kickoff and it was completely full of snow and they mentioned that it could have been the earliest snow game in NFL history.

AccuWeather forecast for Winter 2018-19.

M.A. Vukcevic. Stratosphere and the North Hemisphere’s Winter Weather. Arctic; Sudden Stratospheric Warming. 2011

Stratosphere and the North Hemisphere’s Winter Weather

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=104&v=fOZxwlq8Lsk

Meteo France forecast for winter 18/19. Anyone speak french?, translation won't work for me for some reason. Looks promising from the graphics.

sicknotexi wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=104&v=fOZxwlq8Lsk

Meteo France forecast for winter 18/19. Anyone speak french?, translation won't work for me for some reason. Looks promising from the graphics.

Lots of Snow and Ice …… love it....:D

sicknotexi wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=104&v=fOZxwlq8Lsk

Meteo France forecast for winter 18/19. Anyone speak french?, translation won't work for me for some reason. Looks promising from the graphics.

Colder than average for Ireland in December, with snow threatening around then, followed by "glacial" conditions in January for the majority of Europe (for Britain and Ireland in particular). :O February less severe but still below average.

What's the French word for "ramp"? :P

Since Bastardi mentioned the lunar declination cycle, I could add that all of these epic winters were close to the same point in that 18.6 year cycle -- 1684, 1740, 1795, 1814, 1888 (more epic in New England), 1945, 1963, 1981-82 (all the others were listed just by the January-February years).

The problem is that all the non-listed cases either 18 or 19 years apart failed to produce a very cold winter and the closest candidates are sometimes 2-3 years offset (2000 or 2001 failed and so did most on either side for quite some distance). When it was a fail, it often wasn't any milder than average though. The numbers show a dip of over 1 C deg for year 13 of the 18.6 year cycle and very few features in the profile other than that. I used to think there was some significance to it but as I developed my research, I discovered that possibly the year 13 effect was caused by two or three other cycles sharing a harmonic frequency with the lunar declination cycle.

There really should not be any particular physical significance to the declination cycle in terms of affecting the weather. What is it, you may be wondering?

Here's the rough explanation.

The moon goes around the same path as the ecliptic plane, the path that the earth travels around the Sun. However, it is inclined by 5.1 degrees to that plane. And the nodes of the orbit (where it intersects the ecliptic plane) regress (move backwards relative to the direction of orbit) fast enough that the whole cycle takes only 18.6 years to complete.

When the Moon hits +5.1 deg latitude at its highest declination (which is on average 23.5 deg) then the declination approaches 29 degrees north. That point is taken as year zero of the cycle. A winter full moon then looks higher in the sky than it usually would. The summer full moon looks lower because it is at 29 degrees south declination. About 4.5 years later, the high point comes when the Moon is crossing the equator on its way up to that high declination. The extremes are then similar to the average, as the latitude differentials take place at the zero declination points midway between them. Another 4.5 years on, the latitude excursions are opposite to the declination peaks, and so the winter full moon achieves only 18.4 deg of declination north, the summer full moon (I should say Dec and June to be more precise) is at 18.4 deg of declination south. Then you come to the point we are now passing, where the Moon is higher than the ecliptic plane on its way down from northern declination maximum to southern declination maximum (I shorten these to northern max and southern max in my research since these are times when the Moon is crossing the galactic equator and it appears to produce some resonant waves in the atmosphere).

This cycle then completes when the latitude bulge returns to northern max after 18.6 years.

The only possible physical effect this might have on the atmosphere, as speculated first by Bryson about 1950, would be that the declination range might be correlated with atmospheric wave amplitudes. But even if so, there would be no obvious reason why year 13 would have a narrow band of much colder winters. When I first spotted this in my early research, I thought it might have to do with a slowdown of some acceleration of the jet stream around low declination (year 9-10) years, so something like a more zonal period followed by a gradual return to more blocking. This may be the background cause and effect but as to why it concentrates on year 13 and is not more spread out in the data, no plausible reason.

The most recent lunar declination year zero was 2006, so 2019 is year 13 if that was year zero. In my convention, I would take whatever year had the declination maximum range, regardless of decimal point, as year zero and count from there. But others might go from a year 1 to a year 19, which would appear three times out of five (in my system it goes from 0 to 18 and sometimes a year is both 0 and 18).

I did a lot of investigation of this paradigm in the first year or two of my research and it isolated the importance of what I now call "lunar events" where the Moon is close to other gravitational sources and apparently setting up some interference patterns in our atmosphere. But as to the actual latitude or declination, that seems less important than the separation of the objects, and at declination maxima, the Moon is moving across broad areas of similar mass-gravitation potential so that its exact path would not matter as much.

There may be some more to it, but I now consider about a hundred factors to be more important to the research model than lunar declination. What may be more significant is lunar perigee which has a cycle of just under 9 years, and the motion of that cycle is prograde (in the direction of the orbital motion). At this point, the lunar perigee is near northern maximum (the early winter full moon position). This may intensify the northern max wave effect which, if there is also blocking present, will intensify the entire circulation including high pressure.

By the way, I am still thinking the potential is good for this cold and snowy winter scenario. The cold turn recently will not last unbroken into that cold winter, I feel quite certain that we will go back into zonal flow for a good part of mid to late November before better winter patterns start to develop again. But the timing of this seems generally in line with early indications from most other cold winters (about two-thirds of which seemed to be cold in late October from the long CET record).

CFS ensembles again picking up on a stratospheric warming of some kind in late November or December.

https://twitter.com/WorldClimateSvc/status/1056894162828701697

A year I have been mentioning throughout the season for Winter is 1978-79 i.e. the Winter of Discontent. Netweather users have been doing the same I see. Well, it should be noted that December 1978 had a Canadian Warming in the stratosphere. Mmmmmm.



This reanalysis of years that contained a SSW or CW in November or December looks strikingly similar to the above for 1978-79:

https://twitter.com/MJVentrice/status/1057994334459584512

https://twitter.com/judah47/status/1057984937792548864