The Ten Minute Sunrise Ten minutes from home, ten minutes of good color, ten minutes back home. Notice the birds in this one, they were really flying around this morning. http://weathercrazy.smugmug.com/Landscapes/Winter-20142015/i-ZVw7jxr/0/L/1.%201.9.15%20G%20Mt.%20Hood%20Sunrise%20Birds-L.jpg
Nothing worked out(other than a brief cold intrusion) with the late December cold snap with the right things in line here in the PNW, so who knows, maybe the next round will be epic here with no indices matching up they way they "should". This is not a smart a** comment towards you Phil, just a thought.
The GOA low is a product of the convection associated with the MJO over the west Pacific. That will calm down in the next couple weeks as the wave dies and the pattern resets.
Long - LONG ways to go-- but the GFS continues to show an impressive system for the Upper Midwest (and other parts) for late in the period. And the "pull back" doesn't look like anything that happened in DEC-- Just time for Mother Nature to reload some rounds into the Arctic Express 12 gauge!@!
I doubt that. We've had terrible winters in the distant past also. As I've mentioned before the winters from 1937-38 through 1941-42 rivals any horrible 5 winter period we have had in recent times. The big wild card is the coming solar grand minimum. We will soon find out just how much of a factor that was in causing the Little Ice Age.
We've been in line for storms to track and none of them have panned out. Sitting on three inches this season. I hope the end of the month shows some pop. Cold and dry is boring.