Winter 2018/2019 - General Discussion

For those who don't know, it takes a while for the stratospheric response to the warming to downwell (ie reach the troposphere) so there won't be an instant pattern change. If it happens very quickly, like in February 2018, it is known as a Quick Tropospheric Response (QTR).

Gonzo wrote: »

unfortunately no real letup over next few weeks, plenty of wind and rain in the run up to Christmas. Hopefully things will quieten down around Christmas week.

Hi Gonzo, check out the latest update from MT via Netweather, in particular the first sentence of the last paragraph.......I think the upcoming Atlantic muck, will be a tad colder than the recent muck.........and things might get interesting around Xmas time!!

D


The latest (00z) GFS run starts to look like this scenario of cold engaging around Christmas, and there are some juicy charts on offer by 23rd-24th. My guess is that these will waver back and forth to more zonal looking maps but at the very least something like those maps will probably appear sooner or later in the last days of the month and or start of Jan 2019. It's just a matter of time until all the cold air attacking the jet stream wins big and pushes it well south over most of the Atlantic sector, because we know the Pacific is not going to be a place for much trough development given the combination of El Nino (Modoki) and the persistent blob of warm water in the Gulf of Alaska.

The early freeze-up of Hudson Bay is now 3/4 complete with James Bay frozen on its western shore, and that means the cold pool over the central Canadian arctic region should form a secondary lobe over Quebec due to easier cold advection with ice instead of stratus inducing cold waters. So with that anchor to induce a Greenland block, the question becomes one of geometry for the eastern Atlantic response, will it be a Greenland to northwest Russia blocking high, or a deep trough. Perhaps it will be alternating spells of each type. That might spread the snow around a bit more too with different wind directions in play during cold spells.

I am very optimistic about the cold prospects, even the fact that El Nino seems to be weakening slightly is probably a good thing, it should make the lows from Gulf of Mexico a bit less potent so they either wobble around in the western Atlantic eventually or try to get into the subarctic gyre near Baffin Island. That's an improvement over the Diana style raging zonality of a few days back. But it will take 1-2 weeks to kill off the signal.

Sick of this god damn weather. Hope its not like this over Xmas.

Is this the result of the warm summer we got?

Hmmm we are now approaching mid December and there’s still no end in sight to stormy conditions and rain on the weather models.

Notwithstanding that there’s an optimism amongst many weather watchers that borders on something akin to certainty that this winter is going to be extra special and cold.

My take is that the weather will do what it wants as usual, and not to get caught up in the hype. The tail end of the ECM output is now the solstice and it is still showing Atlantic depressions. For a cold spell in late December/early January you would expect the models to be hinting more and more of such a thing, but the cold facts are that they are not.

So far we have had little significant frost, but a lot of cool and wet weather. I personally doubt there’s a memorable cold spell coming anywhere in the first half of winter at this point.