I feel like changes in RH are going to be the lynchpin of this case. If temperatures increase but RH remains steady, that's more water vapor, more latent heat, more water to potentially squeeze out.

It almost always is hot down in the SW, but looks extra hot this summer (if that ends up being accurate). Glad I went through that area in the spring.

Implying the monsoon never gets going in July-September, and 4CH is suppressed to the south or east? Good news for the NW....

An area of drought has crept up in south Florida including the Everglades. That wasn't anticipated, at least by me, in El Niño year as almost all of the southeast gets a soaking. Montana and Idaho drought continues. Mountain fires anticipated there later in the summer. West Texas drought expanded into the Laredo area of the Rio Grande. No change in Kansas or the southwest. This week marked the end of the parade of west to east storms along the Gulf Coast. Maybe El Niño is fading to the ENSO neutral?

There are some constraints though based on theory. Precipitation has to increase globally by 1-2% per degree C. The water sucking capacity of the atmosphere will increase because of potential evapotranspiration going up. I do think some of those assumptions are based on constant RH though? I also seem to recall that there are some uncertainties about how RH is actually changing regionally (although I think it’s decreasing globally)?? I’ll concede that if the general circulation is perturbed enough by climate change, then you could definitely get a different distribution of where the wet and dry areas are. But the wet/dry season climate of the PNW seems to fit the theoretical paradigm pretty well, better than many other areas certainly.