Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Long Range Pattern Preventing Sustained Warmth

The long range weather pattern is not looking friendly in terms of sustained warm weather.

Shown above is a composite chart of 16 days worth of forecasted 500mb height anomalies from the American GFS Ensembles. The days increase from left to right, top to bottom. The current situation we are in (top left image) includes low pressure in the West and high pressure in the East. This set up allows for warm weather and thus potential for severe weather like we are seeing today and tomorrow. However, over the next week or two, low pressure looks to swing south and east from Canada and the Rocky Mountains to land in the East US. From there, high pressure appears to set up in the West US, and this provides us with the signal that colder temperatures are on the way for many in the central and east US. In the very long range, on the bottom row of images, forecasts show high pressure engulfing the nation from coast to coast. This would support a warmer scenario, but unless we see sustained low pressure in the West US, i'm not willing to buy into a scenario that gives actual springtime temperatures for the East US.

Andrew

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Andrew may be more to this cooler pattern. Some very stidied individuals say watch sun flux activity. It may be peaking at lower level at this point than expected; but jury is still out and will not know for several more weeks. If peak is lower than expected temperatures could be cooler this summer than normal but again just a possibility at this point sun flux wise and not yet confirmable

Mike