Rocky Mountain High

I will be leaving for Colorado tomorrow morning, preparing to attend a workshop Tuesday hosted by Ed Berry and Klaus Weickmann. We'll be getting into global drivers of weather patterns, specifically with the "global wind oscillation" (some of you may have heard of this), in an attempt to improve forecasting going out 2-4 weeks. It should be a very interesting experience, and of course, getting a little trip out of the deal in a scenic area is pretty cool too.

I'll be doing a review of meteorological winter soon, which ends with the conclusion of February ("meteorological" winter covers the months of December to February only, as they are, on average, the coldest three months of the year. There will be a lot of interesting and unique things to discuss, some of which may be covered in the workshop as well. There were several "la nina" influences on the season, but we managed to get quite cold in many areas in January, which wasn't expected by the vast majority of forecasters, and this has certainly skewed the winter to the colder side in much of the eastern U.S, though the Southeast, in typical nina-like fashion, has been warmer than normal. I have posted below a map showing the temperature anomalies for this winter so far, which won't change much with only 6 days left until the end. Now we move on to Spring and severe weather season, though of course will still watch for any late season snow events as well. Image below courtesy of MDA.