Winter Outlooks

[ndscott50]

The first of the winter outlooks are coming out. Unfortunately its not great news. Lets hope we get some surprises to the up side. At least were getting some late summer rain this week to hopefully lesson the fall fire season.



We really need the forecasted fall La Nina development to not happen and the very low probability of late winter El Nino development to happen.

 

[Dorado]

It seems like the El Niño La Niña patterns aren’t very good at predicting precipitation these days. And this La Niña, is forecasted as minimal. As I recall, the last two huge snow years we’ve had were during La Niña periods or neutral years? I know at least the last one was in 22-23, where we had a super cold and snowy winter …

 

[sphoppie]

I'm hoping for the Farmers Almanac predictions.

 

[Ryan]

I'm hoping for the Farmers Almanac predictions.

View attachment 33638

Man, I know what we need, but it is SUPER hard to like a map that calls for “very cold”…..

 

[ndscott50]

It would be nice if the farmers almanac was correct. I do wonder if they are even trying at this point with there it will be wet or snowy everywhere forecast. I went with the lazy approach and asked chat GPT if there were ever winters where there was above normal precipitation across all of the US and it came back with, "There’s no evidence in NOAA’s historical climate records that every U.S. region has had above-normal winter precipitation in the same year" Bold forecast Farmers Almanac!

 

[JFRCalifornia]

It seems like the El Niño La Niña patterns aren’t very good at predicting precipitation these days. And this La Niña, is forecasted as minimal. As I recall, the last two huge snow years we’ve had were during La Niña periods or neutral years? I know at least the last one was in 22-23, where we had a super cold and snowy winter …

As far as the correlation between El Nino and runoff, it's spotty at best for the Colorado River.... Here's a post that dives into this correlation deeper than anybody really asked for, but here you go...

Post in thread 'El Niño winter almost guaranteed.'

Aug 28, 2023

This is a repost of something I responded to on a similar thread from a while back, but worth adding here, since it's relevant to the topic...

******

Well I've been following this but until now didn't have time to chime in on what I think is going on relative to El Nino, La Nina, and inflow (as if I know!)...

But I'll start with breaking down the data we have, at least in an overly simplistic way. Let's start with this website, which is a pretty good summary of all the El Nino and La Nina events back to 1950:

El Niño and La Niña Years and Intensities

That website does a nice job...

• JFRCalifornia

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[Dorado]

An excellent analysis, curious what the cycle was in 22-23 water year? Because that was a monster in terms of snowpack throughout California and the Rockies. One thing that stands out to me, because we experienced 70 mornings of below zero temperatures, was that not only was that a wet winter, but it was cold. Gotta have the combination of colder temperatures for the snow to stay around long enough to melt and runoff for it to end up at Lake Powell!

 

[Fisher-man]

Well, it would be interesting to see what that report said back in 22-23. The best they can do at any time is about 3 days out, so not sure how accurate a 4-6 month prediction can be. I know they follow el nino, la nina, ocean currents, etc, but I've never put much stock in anything beyond a couple days.

 

[JFRCalifornia]

Well, it would be interesting to see what that report said back in 22-23. The best they can do at any time is about 3 days out, so not sure how accurate a 4-6 month prediction can be. I know they follow el nino, la nina, ocean currents, etc, but I've never put much stock in anything beyond a couple days.

If you're talking about predicting the "weather", then meteorologists would agree you're only good about 3 days out. But if you're doing long-range predictions (veering more into "climate"), which has a lot of daily variations in the weather, then long-range forecasts are typically pretty accurate in the big picture. Not always, but more often than not. In general, long-range accuracy is increasing as the modeling becomes more robust, more data is collected and analyzed, and there are more and better models to compare outcomes across.

As for what happened in the big runoff year of '22-'23, that was a weak-to-moderate La Niña. And for the not-so-good runoff year of '23-'24, that was a pretty strong El Niño. So go figure. And now, we've slipped back into a weak LaNiña again...

Graph attached...