Webberweather

So much for that blowtorch we were promised.

Boy, it'd be really nice to have a -EPO right about now to dislodge the coldest air (relative to normal) in Alaska & send it hurdling towards the CONUS.

Again, the graphic you showed isn't an MJO forecast, it's just an extrapolation based entirely on how the MJO typically evolves from the Western Pacific. The character of the forcing changes appreciably when this MJO wave reaches the Western Hemisphere, it's going to be significantly weaker & faster moving than normal, which changes the magnitude and even sign of the response in N America. Slower, stronger MJO waves are typically more effective at generating desired responses in the NAO for ex.

We're not going into RMM phase 8 and that's very obvious now. The graphic you're showing above is not an MJO forecast, it's based entirely on empirical wave propagation. This basically extrapolates the MJO wave from its present longitude forward in time based on what "usually" occurs, it does not account for attenuation and re-emergence of MJO waves, their phase speeds, or standing waves which all influence MJO behavior and the RMM index. The upper level circulation anomaly from this MJO wave will enter the western hemisphere but it won't be anywhere near as strong and partitioned largely into the Kelvin Wave band (even more than it normally is).

As expected, the CFSv2 finally caved to other NWP and doesn't show the MJO reaching phase 8.

No, the above normal to our north is a result of mild, Pacific air flooding south-central Canada. Source regions for cold air in the arctic become warm(er) when the initial air mass moves out & is usually replaced by a warmer one that's usually from the south (simply because near the north pole, almost any wind (and thus advection of air masses) is from the south which is a warm wind (minus when an air mass is being transported from Siberia)).

Our source region for continental polar & arctic air masses is virtually always above normal when cooler air is displaced southward (whether that's Siberia, the Arctic, Alaska, etc). The source region physically being closer to us is the only part that's not beneficial, but it's also late January, a passing, modest cP air mass will be roughly as intense as a very strong arctic air mass in early March. No signs (yet) of a warm up on NWP going into early February. If anything, this pattern looks pretty decent into the first few days of February.

So much for that blowtorch.

This last statement is extremely important & very true. The biggest winter storm in NC's history was this bad boy in 1927 (which came on the heels of what was the warmest February on record): You wanna know what the pattern looked like during that storm? If we get a nice shortwave to sneak underneath the ridge at the right time and slide the ridge axis just a little further north, oh boy...

When is the blowtorch gonna hit my house.

My neck of the woods is gonna have a hard time torching in the coming 1-2 weeks. A ridge axis centered over the Hudson Bay coupled w/ an active subtropical jet isn't exactly a warm pattern around here, and if we get a strong(er) 50-50 low to boot w/ these cut-offs and an active southern jet w/ marginally cool enough air mass near most of our peak climo(s) for snow, who knows... Tough scene for torch mongers down this way.

Even with the +EPO/+NAO, this 10-15 day pattern on the EPS is a few tweaks away from being pretty solid. Cold air will be limited obviously but this big trough near Atlantic Canada might be able to amend that, at least a little bit.

The summers are a bit nicer in Charlotte (rarely reach 100F) but they're still pretty bad. It's definitely hard to replicate that feeling in the NE US w/ every storm, just imagine that times 10 when it snows down south.

I sincerely appreciate the invite, if I had the time & money and really became that desperate later this winter, I'd take you up on that offer. Not even having the slightest sniff of snow is extremely tantalizing, but alas that's the fact of life being a snow weenie in the south. After being in Boston this past week, I honestly can't complain about the more frequent breaks in winter & milder weather. It was certainly nice to come back to temps in the 50s. I left yesterday morning with temps well into the 10s with wind chills close to 0, I haven't experienced wind chills that cold in NC in a very long time.

For those interested, here's where you can access real-time multivariate PNA data: https://ncics.org/portfolio/monitor/mjo/extratropics/ Here's the associated supporting literature: https://www.nws.noaa.gov/ost/climate/STIP/37CDPW/37cdpw-cschreck.pdf In a nutshell, the big advantage(s) of the multivariate PNA are that it uses more variables than the traditional 500mb index, utilizing 200 hpa & 850 hpa streamfunction anomalies and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR). It thus likely more adequately represents the mid-latitude Pacific-North American (PNA) response to tropical convective anomalies