The story so far this month has been the impressive cold temperatures, not only here but in much of the country. Kansas City’s high was colder than the average temperature there in Mid-January. This cold pattern we have been in is about to end for a while, in about 5 days, but the dryness will continue until the pattern changes, which looks to start between November 20-25th. Here is what the GFS shows for snow mostly between the 20th-25th. I posted the southwest US so that you can see the storms come from a favorable storm path for us, notice Flagstaff.

 Below you can see how the GFS handles these storms between the 20th and the 25th and as you can see at the end of the model cycle there is another storm rolling in on its heels.

As you know the operational model of the Euro will only take us out 10 days, hopefully, next week we will start seeing that model pick up on what the GFS is seeing.

I am still very encouraged with what I am reading about Winter. There is one private sector model that has done very well over the years. I subscribe to the firm that uses it, they primarily consult to the energy companies and commodity traders. Here are the temperature anomalies they have for meteorological winter. White is normal blues and purples are below normal, the temperature differences are in Celsius.

As far as the snow goes, they are saying normal to very slightly above normal for our area, in this case, white is normal while blues and purples are above average. They have chosen 10 years that they feel will compare favorable to this winter. 1963/64, 1965/66, 2009/10, 1996/97, 2013/14, 2004/05, 1968/69, 2003/04, 1977/78, 1966/67. Of these 10, 2 years were below average. 4 years were above average (3 of those 4 were in the top ten including 96-97 which was #1 with 133″ downtown)

I get asked about NOAA’s forecast, they use their long-range CFSv2 model for their probability scheme which is constantly mislabeled as a winter forecast. I could go on and on and plan to do a post on it later but in this case, two pictures speak a thousand words.

Here was the CFSv2 model’s temperature forecast for October. This was issued September 11th.

Here is how October temperatures actually turned out.

I am going to add some content including a whole section of nerd updates that you will easily be able to navigate, and also a section of links to some of my favorite sites. Anytime I update the site it will be posted on Facebook. Let me know how you like the new set up, don’t beat me up too badly on design, eventually, I will have someone polish it up for me!