BTRWx's 2019-2020 Winter Outlook Analyses

DISCLAIMER: Not everything from this blog post is sound factual science.  These are my own thoughts about recent seasonal forecasting trends.  I'm not a meteorologist, but I have a meteorology-equivalent degree and would like to pursue the career field.

The data is becoming clearer about what the upcoming winter may bring.  I have compiled three analog years that I believe have similar implications for this upcoming winter season.  They are 2004-2005, 2014-2015, and 2018-2019.  I chose these years by comparing late summer global sea surface temperatures (ssts) to this year (2019).  The sea surface temperature data was plotted from NASA's GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (v4).  Atmospheric data was plotted using NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory's Reanalysis data.  

 

 

 

Global mean ssts were above average for each analog year during August.  Particularly, the Pacific Northwest waters were much above average for the listed analog years.  This region can play an important role for foreshadowing what weather may occur farther east toward the Mid Atlantic, the region of focus for this blog.  What typically happens is a ridge commonly forms over the area of warmer ssts and the jetstream rounds the ridge anti-cyclonicly (clockwise).  A downstream trough forms between the central U.S. and Midwest states and the jetstream rounds the axis to the south cyclonicly (counter-clockwise) towards the Mid Atlantic.  This is how the Mid Atlantic often experiences stormy weather and favorable winter storm tracks.  If ssts look like this during winter, I'll be more excited.  But we're still a couple months away from winter, so the ssts will likely change.

The tropical eastern Pacific shows near neutral sst anomalies for each analog year.  This region is arguably the most important area for seasonal forecasting, but because the ssts are near normal, there is no strong signal.  There's generally a warm northern Atlantic Basin and near normal equatorial Atlantic among the analogs and below normal ssts just north of Australia.  These consistencies were notable for why I chose the three noted analog years.  

Knowing previously mentioned analysis, I plotted the analog years into user-defined map criteria.  Atmospheric conditions from December to February generally show above normal heights signifying potentially slightly above normal temperatures for much of the winter.  The lower heights over the Arctic (blue shading) are not a good sign for favorable winter conditions over the eastern U.S.  We want to see the opposite of that, and we especially want higher heights over central Greenland.  Early indications would show winter 2019-2020 as not great, but not horrible either.  

 

 

Digging deeper into each month, a few pattern trends stand out to me.  February appears to show the the best chances for below normal temperatures while the warmest month would be December.  January looks to be near normal.  D.C. averages 15.4" total seasonal snowfall annually and I expect 2019-2020 to be very close to average snowfall.  I would lean slightly above average temperatures overall with the coldest part of winter being late February and likely into March.