Maybe I’m weird but I’ve always liked the early sunsets. The long evenings can be cozy. On the flip side I’ve always enjoyed the super late sunsets on the opposite side of the year too. I enjoy dynamism when it comes to daylight length throughout the year. To me it would be strange living at a lower latitude where daylight length and sun angle are more uniform year round. I realize this is just personal preference though.
I have, over the years, developed a few tools that work with pretty high accuracy regarding the following Winter.
First, where is the money and what is the "middle" of what people -- insurance companies, energy companies, etc., are predicting.
Natural Gas Futures
Last year, the Natural Gas price in the Fall was extremely low, especially compared to Crude Oil/Gasoline (spreads), and this was a better predictor than seasonal models, which generally had a trough on the East Coast, US, from an expected El Nino pattern.
Current Natural Gas price is $2.64.
Here is a chart going back to 1998, highlighting the highest (blue) vs lowest (red) prices.
Higher Natural Gas price should be linked to colder weather in the eastern US, and Europe. and Lower Natural Gas price should be linked to warmer weather in the eastern US, and Europe.
Here are the Highest Natural Gas years (blue):
Here are the lower Natural Gas price years:
For October, here is where we rank:
1. 1998: $2.27
2. 2015 $2.3
3. 2019: $2.63
4. 2024: $2.64
5. 2023: $2.91
6. 1999: $2.95
26: 2006: $7.53
27: 2007: $8.33
28: 2004: $8.72
29: 2005: $12.2
Furthermore, because of inflation, the Crude Oil or Gasoline vs Natural Gas spread is a better gauge for relative value.
We are currently #2 in this metric [since 1998], behind only last year (23-24).
ENSO
I manually plotted all ENSO variables (200mb wind, 850mb wind, OLR, SSTs, SOI, pressure, MEI, etc.), and I found that the most correlated ENSO measurement to the North Pacific [PNA] pattern, is ENSO subsurface. This works at +0-time.
Because of this, I use the subsurface primarily to determine what the ENSO state is, and is going to be for the Winter. Obviously, in the future, it could change, but right now we are completely Neutral.
For most of the year so far, we have been in a "La Nina" in the subsurface:
This has correlated with a -PNA pattern
Now that the subsurface has neutralized, the PNA is not correlating so highly
NAO
In 2005, I found that the N. Atlantic SSTs in a region from New Foundland to Greenland from May-Sept have a high correlation to the following Winter's NAO. The correlation was almost 0.5 (or 75% of getting the sign right). I made a manual index of the region, and have followed its predictions every year since 2005. I estimated that this NAO predictor index has a 0.54SD at getting the Dec-March NAO correctly (+1.00 index is 50% odds of +0.46 to +1.54 DFJM NAO). In real time, that method has been 9-9 on the 0.54 SD since Inception, and it has gotten the phase correctly 13-5. That is real future time forecasting results. Here is what the index encompasses:
I weight the index as follows:
It's been working out great in real-time.
This year, the index comes out at:
Top area: ~0.0 (x1.00)
Bottom area: ~+0.8 (x0.65)
Total: +0.52
+0.52 NAO predictor for Dec-Jan-Feb-Mar.
That means there is a 50% chance the DJFM NAO will be -0.02 to +1.06 (using 0.54 standard deviation)
That gives a 74% chance of the Winter DJFM NAO being Positive overall.
PDO
I have been burned on the PDO! I do not think SSTs lead, I think they are more secondary to atmospheric conditions, and things occurring at the surface. But the last 4 years, and actually the last 30 years, the PDO has performed admirably. The mathematical odds are something like 1/100 for random to hit as much as the PDO has over this time. Because of that, I will give it some credence.
CURRENT PDO IS NEAR -3.
That is 2nd on record for October, going back to the early 1900s. Only 1955 had a lower October PDO.
Here is what PDO correlation looks like in the Winter (map default is the "+" phase, you have to flip it around to get a negative PDO correlation).
Rolled-forward North American Temps
December 2023 to August 2024 was the warmest on record for the CONUS, due mostly to +EPO pattern.
This is getting long, so I'm going to cut it short. I made an analog list of 30 matching analogs (75 total years in dataset.. 30 analogs is 40%) and I got a really strong signal the following Nov-March.
When you have 40% of the dataset used, you'd expect the anomalies to come out at +1F, but what I found was a much stronger signal than that:
Dec-June analogs:
Following Winter (40% of dataset!):
Mexican Heat Wave in May
Mexico crushed records in May. I found that similar analogs rolled above average temperatures to the eastern 1/2 of the CONUS for the following Sept-March.
Phoenix Heat Wave
It's the warmest Sept 25 - Oct 13 in Phoenix all time. I think they broke their 2-week record by more than +7F!
I came up with 20 + analogs and found this for the following Winter rolled-forward:
Winter Forecast
There are a lot of things that I consider that I also didn't talk about, but I may post more in the coming days.
Precip:
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