Dude... second half of May was below normal. Look up the F6 data. And crisis mode?? I am barely paying attention. We have had more than enough sunny days to keep me happy. Getting into a model debate with the trolls is mostly for entertainment and I was arguing in favor of staying cool. When we first moved here we had nice summers... 2003-2007. Then 2008, 2010, and 2011 happened. And its been nice since. I don't give 2 sh*ts what the weather was like in the 1990s or 1950s if you want to call that our "normal" summer or if people on here are craving whatever they had when they were kids. I can go way back and find nice summers in the 1800s and early 1900s. We all get stuck in nostalgia for many things from our childhood. But climate (like society) is ever evolving with different regimes and longer term cycles. Nothing stays the same. And we aren't stuck here. If nature decides to give us nothing but 1954 summers then we can easily leave.

It wasn't abnormal in the slightest. Maybe a degree or two below a more curved, warming trendline. But 2026 wouldn't even stick out in the slightest if you weren't looking for it, barring it being the very latest datapoint. You remind me a lot of myself from earlier this winter and last winter when I was freaking out over uninterrupted warm Pacific air. I was getting mad at our climatology. It seems that unless we have a definitively warm season or month, you enter crisis mode. They say in Seattle, summer begins July 5th. Given the medium and long range trends, that's probably going to be more true than not this year as well. It happened in 2022, 2020, and much, much more so 2012 and earlier. You've had it so "good", you've been spoiled into forgetting what normal summer used to be like. I'm sure you remember what it used to be like when you first moved here! In a similar vein, 2016-2022 made me forget just how rotten our winters can get. We'll get another large arctic event eventually. Just as July and August will come and deliver proper heat, maybe as early as the second half of June. This is the way it works here, being right on the coast of the coldest ocean at this latitude, north of the meridian line, directly downstream of the Gulf of Alaska.

The good thing is we play the Rams at the end of the season…Stafford should be on the sidelines by then, and Puka will be puking in the back of some Limo and forget what day they are playing. We should be fine.

Torchiest anomalies will probably be after February 1st this time, from the looks of it. Hard to get a more hostile analog pool for late season cold and snow than this. Background state will probably be hot garbage but it's not impossible that things line up right for a week or so at some point Dec 10 - January 20. This season's mountain snowpack was once in a generation level awful, I can't imagine there's a strong chance next season will be quite as bad. If it is, good luck to the ecosystem, lol.

The actual problem is strong/super Niños have been relatively rare thus far in the 21st century, so our brains revert to recency bias. We’ve only had 2 truly powerful Niños in the last 26+ years, and one of them (2023/24) developed via a conduit not observed since the 1970s, which rendered the global state unfavorable for a potent Aleutian Low Unlike 2023/24, the mean state will actually be favorable for a strong Aleutian Low this winter, similar to 2015/16 and most of the super Niños during the second half of the 21st century.