# The Single Chair Weather Blog 2013-14 prediction Josh for Mad River Glen



## ScottySkis (Nov 29, 2013)

*Saturday, November 23, 2013*

*SCWB turns decadal and winter hinting it may have some big things in store for us !!*

http://madriverglenweather.blogspot.com/
Some early-season winter teas' n  seems to have many excited about the upcoming winter and why not, winter  may be nuisance to many, but for MRG enthusiasts, tis a glorious time.  With that time now approaching, the 10th season of SCWB begins (crazy  that it's been that long). With snow-capped General Stark, I know it  seems like the blog is getting a late start, but I try to keep updates  within the confines of the MRG ski season which typically begins a bit  later than some close rivals. So yes, we are beginning right on time.

All  winter seasons seem to consist of some hype. If it isn't coming from  yours truly, I am sure it would take a rather effortless scouring of the  internet to find someone else that is all juiced up about the upcoming  snow season. But with the current month of November already providing  some biting intrusions of cold weather and frequent dustings of high  elevation snow, it seems even the cynics want to play with the hype  machine. It is certainly refreshing to be enveloped in all these  positive vibes. It is certainly been a few years since winter has  started with a bang. The winter of 2008-2009 featured the last chilly  November and big start to a season. A few New England veterans told me  that winter felt like a "throw-back" to the old days for its propensity  to unleash the full variety of weather with big temperature swings, all  kinds of weather, brutal cold shots and most importantly a few winter  storms. This, by the way is the 20th anniversary of my favorite winter  (1993-1994). That winter started a little slow, but in spite of weather pattern that was dominated by  somewhat adverse teleconnection indices, arctic air of an unusually  strong intensity continuously clashed with a steady stream of southern  branch energy. The result a 6-7 week stretch of continuous cold and big  winter storms that would occur weekly. If you could have scored  Tuesday's and Wednesday's off during that year, it was a true winning  lottery ticket.

The  winter of 1993-1994 comes to mind as I have watched the current month  of November play out. I recently returned from my 2-week honeymoon and I  can remember looking at the weather pattern going into the month and  thinking of how generally unexciting and mild it appeared, particularly  as it related to our favorite teleconnection indices, the AO, NAO and  PNA. Yet upon my return, the actual weather has defied all of that and  the month will finish with one of the coldest thanksgiving weeks that  interior New England has seen in 20 years. Sure, it may seem overly  analytical to get hyper-focused on these details but I am a geek like  that, and I do believe these little subtleties can provide important  clues to how the weather on the mountain plays out this season.
All of that aside, it remains  vitally important to focus first on more quantifiable variables that  have some proven merit. With that, let me unleash the disclaimer about  how incredibly inexact the science of seasonal forecasting is, how fluid  long range weather predicting can be and most importantly, how many  longer range outlooks get inflated with first-rate BS. The state of the  ENSO however is not BS part of a long range forecast, particularly a  winter forecast. It remains one of the best ways to get a early sense of  how a winter might behave from a personality standpoint. The ENSO, for  the last three winters has been in a La Nina state, the last winter  featuring a very weak La Nina and one that only developed midway through  the winter. This winter much like last features a equatorial Pacific  Ocean where sea surface temperatures are average, thus yielding an ENSO  close to neutral (a positive SST anomaly yields an El Nino while a  negative yields a La Nina). We have some experience with the analysis  (being that we have been doing this 10 years) and the ENSO neutral  winters tend to be on the colder side of a somewhat upward trending  moving average of temperatures. The three worst winters for both snow  and cold in the last 15 years (01-02, 05-06 and 11-12) were all La Nina  winters and many of the other winters that were noticeably mild (but  with periods of decent snow) often had a significant El Nino. This is  not to say that winter can't defy this logic, the weather always seems  to defy any logic but the probabilities weightings of cold verses warm  can certainly be adjusted. It was also found that neutral winters tended  to be drier across New England. The signal was not extraordinary but  the stormiest winter seasons have tended to occur during significant  ENSO winters on either side. Our next point of focus is the PDO or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. We  have defined it a few times in our many pre-season outlooks as an index  which reflects the configuration of sea surface temperatures in the  mid-latitude Pacific as opposed to the equatorial Pacific (where ENSO is  decided). Like the SCWB, which also has become decadal, the PDO tends  to prefer a positive or negative index every 15-20 years and thus the  "decadal". Sometime around the birth of the SCWB the PDO turned negative  and only two of the last 10 winters have had a positive index. There is  a relationship the PDO has with the ENSO. Most La Nina winters feature a  negative PDO and vice versa for El Nino winters. Since the relationship  is far from perfect, the PDO does deserve its own little section in our  pre-season synopsis. Like, the previous 3 winters, the PDO this year  has a negative sign (-0.86 as of the last update) and this typically  means weather patterns rotate in and out frequently. We have had and  will continue to have an occasional encounter with the "evil empire".  This term described the tightening of the jet stream in the Pacific  caused by the clash of an upper level ridge in the Pacific and a trough  over Alaska. The "variability" aspect of the weather in negative PDO  years has been very evident during this year especially even through the  summer. The weather since late last winter has been incredibly  "normal". A few weeks of anomalous warmth has been followed by a few  weeks of anomalous cold with each period failing to persist for more  than 2-3 weeks. The shift to this elongated state of "normal" occurred  after the first half of winter this year after the historic warmth of  2012. I suspect we will see more of this through the upcoming winter  though I think there is reason to think that cold weather will win some  important battles this year and further limit damaging thaws (though I  suspect we will see them). The source of some of the excitement and perhaps one cause of how the  current month has "defied expectations" is the expansion of snow and ice  in the northern hemisphere. The arctic actually saw a more abbreviated  retreat of ice in the arctic regions verses the last few years (although  it was still well below the 30 year average). The expansion through  October and into November has been, shall I say, awesome. Once the final  numbers for November are tallied, the October/November snow and ice  cover in our hemisphere will rival the 2nd highest total in 40 years of  recorded data. We only trail the bicentennial winter of 1976-1977, a  winter that will long be remembered for  long stretches of historic  cold. The Hudson Bay in particular is about 20 percent iced over as of  November 21st, which would be the largest show of ice this early in  about 10 years. It is my belief that the expansion of ice and snow is an  important early season feedback. A larger area of snow and ice cover  creates a larger breeding ground for arctic cold and it is arctic cold  and often the strength of this arctic cold that can often times make or  break a winter. We have seen an early taste of exactly that early this  season with continuous invasions of arctic chill even when some of the  teleconnection indices have argued against it.So what do we make of all this ? We can finally forecast a cold winter  !!! I have not done that too much since it typically is a bad bet  (though I have forecasted a few snowy winters). The colder than average  temperatures will result from what I think will be a few nasty periods  of bitterly cold temperatures but the aforementioned PDO will still  allow for some variability and the occasional thaw, even a damaging one.  The neutrality of the ENSO would suggest less in the way of storminess  so I am reluctant to sell my soul to a snowy winter. We should see at  least something in the range of normal. For the record I will say 1-3  degrees below normal on temperatures and 260-280 inches of snow (which  is just to the above side of normal). Get your mad cards and get your  ski's ready, I expect a fun winter !!


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## MadMadWorld (Nov 29, 2013)

He is always very good. The good news is that he is pretty much guarenteeing at least an average winter and the cold weather will at least prolong the snowpack later in the season. Hopefully the precipitation outlook improves but overall I am feeling good.


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## ScottySkis (Nov 29, 2013)

I hope he is correct.


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## fbrissette (Nov 29, 2013)

These are the seasonal correlations (last 30 years) between precipitation and 12 teleconnection indices for southern quebec (south of the St-Lawrence up to Vermont.  None are significant at either the 0.05 or 0.1 levels.

In other words, nobody knows what kind of winter we're gonna get in November.   Seasonal forecasts have some skill in part of North-America but are worth shit out east.


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## jack97 (Nov 30, 2013)

blogspot is like reading p0rn


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## BenedictGomez (Dec 6, 2013)

MadMadWorld said:


> He is always very good.



Really?  I've followed his blog for several years now, and I generally believe he's pretty poor at predicting the weather.


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