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WINTER WEATHER 2013/2014 - See Mod Note First Post
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Thanks MT.. You literally saved me €720 this morning.. I was about to buy a new spare set of snow tyres.
Interesting read: I really enjoyed this. Hoping the winds are not too strong though. We live on an exposed SW facing hill around 7km from the coast. When it gets windy stuff levitates!
Thanks again!0 -
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Join Date:Posts: 24257
I'd say there's a few people on this forum traumatised this morning after reading MTC's Winter predictions:). I have this image of all the snow lovers here ,after reading the forecast, sitting on a chair with their knees tucked up to their chest rocking back and forth crying saying "it cant be true, it just cant be true":).
It can't be true!! It can't be true!! :eek::eek:
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maquiladora wrote: »Tramore 2013
Oh dear god no.
I remember in 2011 it was 16C on Christmas Evening. I don't want a repeat of it.
It we don't get a cold Winter I hope for a cool summer to make up for it like the Summer 2012.0 -
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Something to look on the bright side of things?
Nice healthy Snow Cover lately ,
31 day animation here , http://www.natice.noaa.gov/ims/loop/afghan-1mo-loop.html
Takes awhile to load though.0 -
M.T. Cranium wrote: »This is my winter 2013-14 forecast for Ireland and the U.K., adapted here for Irish readers (you can see my U.K. version on Net-weather today).
The following forecast is based on the latest upgrade of my research model which attempts to discover and catalogue signals of natural variability on a wide variety of time scales.
In general terms, the winter forecast for the UK and Ireland is for milder than average conditions about two-thirds of the time, and colder than average about one-third of the time, in the main winter months of December, January and February. I could add that both November and March show similar outcomes in the research model output so whatever your preference for a winter season, this should apply, mild spells will tend to outnumber cold spells.
December looks particularly mild as well as early November, and mid to late February. January shows the greatest parity of mild and cold spells and may end up closer to long-term normal values. My IMT predictions with CET predictions in brackets for the various months at this early stage are
NOV 7.5 (7.2) -- about 1-2 above normal
DEC 6.3 (6.1) -- about 1-2 above normal
JAN 4.5 (3.8) -- close to normal or slightly below
FEB 5.2 (4.5) -- close to normal
MAR 6.3 (6.0) -- close to normal
Although I have mentioned mild as the dominant theme, the fact that January sees more equal chances of mild and cold may rescue the winter from the category of very mild and snow-free "modern winter" that often dominated in the period 1988 to 2007, and perhaps this will be more of an "average" winter as a result, so my estimation of wintry disruption potential is something like moderate or about five to ten days in total for most regions (of the UK and eastern Ireland, probably three to seven on average in western Ireland).
I'm expecting some rather lengthy intervals of very mild southwest flow and occasional heavy rainfalls and strong winds during parts of early November, much of December, late January and possibly into part of February although here I expect any mild spells to be more caused by southerly flow associated with European blocking. March by contrast may be dominated more by cold zonal flow patterns.
When it might turn colder (notably parts of mid to late November, and then first half of January) there could be some briefly severe winter conditions and a large-scale reversal of the dominant circulation to high-latitude blocking and northeast winds so that as usual sea-effect snow could provide most of the snowfall potential with perhaps one or two cyclonic storm events in a southerly jet position. My research output is not very encouraging on severity and some of this colder weather may be of the 2006 variety, cold and dry.
Given the overall set-up around the hemisphere, I am also going for a rather cold winter in eastern and central North America, and mild in far eastern Canada and on the west coast of North America inland to about the central plains and prairies. The preferred escape route for arctic air this winter will likely be western Hudson Bay to Great Lakes towards the southeast U.S. states. Note that this pattern places ridges near 110 W and 55 W which if you do the math places the next downstream ridge close to the Greenwich (0W) meridian. That would suggest a Bartlett or Euro-high pattern but with such an active jet stream expected it's more likely to become a fast stormy (SW) flow, so I have added the detail that at least one major windstorm is probable this winter. As readers of my forecasts know, I tend to favour northern maximum around full moon in Dec (16-17) and Jan (15-16) for wind storm potential with new moon a secondary peak. However, the new moon of 1 January is well timed to coincide with a circulation change and so that could turn out to be the stage for the strongest windstorm potential. The following new moon event on 30-31 Jan is also well timed from the trend in the model output.
Meanwhile the chances of a white Christmas seem rather low from this perspective, with a peak in temperatures right on the 25th in the research output, in fact Christmas Day is indicated as having the best chance of all dates this winter to set a record high temperature which would be 14 to 17 C in most regions. Not saying it will necessarily be that mild but above 12 would not surprise me at all given the strength of this mild signal (which then fades away rapidly by New Years).
The coldest days of the winter are indicated to be around 10-14 January which in context of an otherwise rather mild winter brings up an analogue with Jan 1987. It may then turn out to be a case of a bland winter with one very notable cold spell which will some in from the ledge anyway.
I should conclude by noting that the range of uncertainty in these seasonal forecasts is rather large and so these percentages indicate the assessed chances of the winter ending up in each of the 20% groupings based on all past cases:
MILDEST 20% (very mild) ... chance for 2013-14 is 26%
NEXT MILDEST 20% (mild) ... chance for 2013-14 is 33%
NEAR AVERAGE 20% ... chance for 2013-14 is 25%
COLDER 20% (cool) ... chance for 2013-14 is 13%
COLDEST 20% (very cold) ... chance for 2013-14 is 3%
The median probability places this winter around 34th mildest out of 100 cases.
Okay, so who going start the Xmas Heatwave post ? :P
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I agree that nothing is carved in stone in long range forecasts. However, my track record is improving over random chance as demonstrated by the summer forecast, that stated temperatures about 1 C above normal, dry and sunny -- the statistics turned out +1.0 average anomaly for the three months, 84% rainfall and 114% sunshine (this from our summer forecast contest).
I based my prediction for that on the research output rather than any other sources of information available to other long-range forecasters, their estimates were different and it was stated on Netweather (where a lot of these forecasts routinely appear) that my outlook was probably closer than others. The same comment has been made about previous winter outlooks.
That being said, I am in the middle portions of what is likely to be a 15-20 year research and development phase on this model and cannot honestly say where I believe this will lead in another 5-10 years, if I have the good fortune to remain healthy and active (if you didn't know, I am 64 years old and my health has recently been somewhat uncertain).
I am very optimistic about this research approach and have seen more good than bad results in recent years. The same is true for the North American output and forecasts that I make for this continent. But I should not post this without mentioning that my current assessment is only for somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of the output to verify on the right side of normal. It's my experience that periods of longer same-sign verification (an example would be December 2012 in the last winter forecast) also then improve on details because it's difficult for a model to stay same-sign without locking into the phase and amplitude of a 30-60 day temperature signal of some kind.
As to the logic of "two weeks is too much so how can you do seasonal?" this is resolved in verification by comparing two-week forecasts based only on the research, and seasonal. Since this is a black-box over the horizon approach that does not incorporate short-range model degradation (the actual reason for two-week outlook uncertainty) the answer is that a two-week outlook from my research model would have the same chance of verification as a seasonal outlook. There probably is some degradation over time in my research model due to long-term but very slow shifts in the grid being used (geomagnetic field oriented), so it wouldn't be true to say that my theoretical output for 2025 would have the same verification stats as 2014. Also whatever happens between 2014 and 2025 would enter into the time series of all natural signals being identified over 250 years of data (in the UK version, it would be about the same for North America as I have found more or less continuous daily data sets now that extend back into the 1770s). Since one hypothesis is that natural variability signals could slowly change over time, that slow change would factor into model performance but the way this actually works, if I were to run the model for winter 2014-15 now, it should have almost equal verification scores to 2013-14.
Okay, so I realize that all of the above is counter to the consensus in meteorology but then my research method is not yet accepted, nor in my opinion is it really that widely understood or discussed outside of a few weather forums, so really why would the established community know much about it? I find it impossible to publish papers on the method because it's too complex and starts from assumptions that meteorology is not willing to accept or even entertain, namely, that our atmosphere is responding to changes in the solar system magnetic field. Now I should say that these assumptions are not universally rejected around the community, but I find in my reading that the general level of acceptance is in a very early stage of development, as in "we should be looking into this." I already have and these are the results.
Life being the way it is, this forecast will now almost definitely bust horribly. 0 -
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