Hello fellow readers! It's been a little while since my last post. I hope you all had a great summer. We are no squarely within fall, which means I'm starting to get excited about the first flakes of the season flying. For us in SoCal though, that's likely not going to happen for a while longer. 

Check out the 5 day forecast for Mtn. High:

That looks like fall weather to me with no storms in the 5 day window. Temps will be average to above average with light winds and very sunny skies. Not the most ideal conditions for snowmaking unfortunately either. 

We're likely to see a repeat of this forecast going into next week as well... The long range suggests more of the same. 

You can see on the GFS Ensemble runs that the next chance of even a hint of something isn't until the weekend of November 11th. And even at that it's very minimal with only a few model runs showing anything at all. 

The Pacific North American Oscillation (PNA) often depicts if we have a trough or ridge over the West Coast. You can see that right now we're in a positive PNA which implies a ridge over our region. While the trend is for it to drop, it's not dropping into full negative territory. 

This likely means that we'll either just stay and high dry for the foreseeable future or we might be right on the edge of some action that Northern California may receive later in the month. Either way, I'm expecting a fairly dry if not completely dry 2 week period going into the middle of November. 

Winter 2023/2024 Outlook

I posted this graphic the last couple of years since I think it's a useful one in showing the relationship between precipitation for Southern California and the ENSO cycle we're in. This graphic is courtesy of WRCC, the Western Regional Climate Center. This is between 1933 and 2020. As you can see the region is favored by El Nino's much more so than La Nina's. This is in contrast to Northern California, which is not as clear cut as to which ENSO cycle is favored for higher precipitation. 

Last year we were in the midst of a Moderate La Nina. This year though we have switched into El Nino conditions.  The verdict is still out on whether we have a Moderate El Nino this season or a strong one. We are right on the edge right now. The current forecast is for El Nino to persist into the winter months, but it is not likely to strengthen further.

I've outlined in blue the range of possibilities for precipitation for the Southern California coast as a whole.  When you look at the red dots that are greater than one you can see that the majority of them are in the 20 20 - 35 inch range which is greater than the average of all of them, which is 15.21 inches. This would imply that we should see a rainer and hopefully snowier winter season. The problem is that El Nino isn't the only governing factor on what kind of winter we could see. 

There are a couple years that trended much closer to the overall average, so it goes without saying that we should fully expect a wet and snowy winter. Last winter we saw some very unprecedented snowfall across the entire state, and that just goes to show that basing a whole winter outlook on ENSO is risky. 

In SoCal we often get quite a few weeks of dry and sunny weather during the winter with at least a couple good storms in. That is still my expectation for this year, with the slight chance that we could see a wetter and potentially snowier winter. 

Stay tuned with me for the latest updates forecasts for the region. 

Till the next one... Mike out.