Is Winter Over?

I wanted to talk a little about the pattern of the last 45-50 days. The fall/winter pattern that has developed is very unusual and is not behaving in any form or fashion the way it should. During October you had a raging negative PNA which in theory should have torched us...but we come out tempwise well below normal for that month. During the month of November the NAO and AO went positive... but the southeast managed to score an anomalous snow storm in November.

The Arctic oscillation (AO) is raging positive and at near record levels...but as you can feel it's still decently cold outside. On top of all that we are in a La Nina ENSO state... but yet there is a very active and visible El Nino like subtropical Jet stream. Despite La Nina conditions that say we should be warm and dry... we have actually been more cold and wet. We have been able to stay near or below normal despite unfavorable teleconnection indices and a pesky little southeast ridge..also there seems to be an abundance of strong cutoff lows this fall/winter.

Those that say winter is in trouble are totally looking way too much at numbers and teleconnection indices. They're not taking synoptics and verified data into account. As we get closer to a more climatalogical favored time period for winter weather... I see no reason why there wont be nice winter events with plenty of cold air. This fall/winter so far has been very wet compared to most and there has already been two snow events pretty far south for this time of year. We're getting closer to the real winter season here and when we have a nice arctic airmass in place I can totally see one of those big bowling ball cutoff lows dumping snow in a very widespread fashion despite a positive AO/NAO if that is still the case.

Our winter will happen...it's just not going to happen the way we have gotten used to it happening the last two years.