I will be reiterating the previous update completely as the overnight satellite showed a missed connection with the Alaskan storm’s trough base and the ridge was not pushed west. The grids (imaged in the article) continue to show the medium range with what we have been seeing this month so far … the most rain northwest of LA/VT with the flow bringing showers into OC/IE/SD and leaving much of LA/VT out of ‘most’ of the activity. This has forced me to make a new model, it is the image you are seeing and it can be seen larger by clicking it. All I can say is if the period between Christmas and New Years is like the period between now and Christmas … we’re in trouble for meeting the rainfall expectation of an El Nino December
Maybe I should have waited another day to watch the connection but watching it overnight was a painful thing to do. The trough base of the Alaskan storm missed the top of the ridge completely and kept it where it has been all month, just west of Southern California. This pattern is not like last year where the ridge was due west of Oregon, pushing all the storms up into the Pacific Northwest and leaving all of California dry. This year, the ridge is seemingly ‘stuck’ due west of Southern California and this is deflecting the entire surface low activity into San Francisco northward into the Pacific Northwest.
The surface ridge is providing a dry northwest flow on the northeast side and when a front crosses it … it dries out tremendously. You can see this in the grid image, which displays the probability of rain in the longer range span showing most of the rainfall along the Western facing mountain and valley areas, especially down in San Diego County and up through San Luis Obispo and Kern County.
Because of traditional weather models flip-flopping I did decide to develop one that can look into the 0-10 day range. This would be updated every few days for members, but as a whole I can use this to get an idea on any confidence the traditional models supply. If they do not match my new model product then I will wait on announcing a pattern change.
The only thing I can say is that this month will be below average in temperatures and Christmas will also be cold … feeling like Christmas in all areas. Long range between Christmas and New Years has low confidence in any forecast and I will not be looking into that period based on how poor this month has performed thus far with that ridge failing to move.
If this ridge doesn’t change in January, we’re in trouble …
However one thing I did mention was the Super El NIno values being uncharted territory and we do not know those effects on Southern California. It could very well be that a Super El Nino is too strong and acts like a La NIna for us, building a strong ridge west of us and deflecting storms into Northern/Central California. If that is the case, the values between 1.7c and 2.3c is what we need and right now we’re at a 2.7 to 2.8c and dropping. Once this drops to 2.3c my theory is that the ridge will become too weak to sustain itself and break completely as the jet stream sags south.