Ridgmageddon

I just got back from the first day of the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society downtown at the Convention Center...an exhausting but exhilarating event. Thousands of meteorologists, hundreds of talks, booths and exhibits from a variety of vendors and groups, and free food...life doesn't get much better than that. The theme of the meeting-- "Communicating Weather and Climate" --is dear to my heart and one I shall talk about further in another blog.

But that is not what I want to talk about here; rather let discuss the extraordinary weather pattern we are experiencing.

I took a look at the latest model runs just now and they are truly extraordinary...they suggest we are locked in an pattern with ridging (high pressure) over the eastern Pacific and west coast, with the east coast locked in cold weather with more "nor'easters" pummeling the coast.

Today a front went thought our area and believe it or not, we won't see any precipitation until Friday at the earliest...and that won't last. Temperatures will reaching into the 50s, and yes, there will be some sun.

Now lets get back to the models. If there are right, we will not have any significant weather for 7-10 days (and yes I know the reliability of the models plummet after 4-5 days). Here are some samples, the upper level (500 mb) maps at 30, 54, and 18o h out in time. Remember these are like topographic maps...they tell you the height of a certain pressure surface (500 mb, mb is a unit of pressure). 500 mb is about half typical surface pressure. Where the pressure surface bulges up with have ridge, and where it dips down we have a trough. The flow at this level is roughly parallel to the height lines, with higher heights to the right.

In these maps you can see ridging in the west and troughing in east. The ridging is associated with mild temperatures over us and the troughing with cold temps to the east.



Now this output is from one model, the National Weather Service Global Forecast System model (the GFS). To get some idea of whether we should believe this, I checked the "gold standard" global model, the ECMWF (run by the European Center for Medium Range Forecasting in Reading). Same thing. Then I checked the U.S. global ensemble forecasting system model which runs a large number of model predictions each starting slightly differently. Same story. Like spaghetti? One form of output from our ensemble runs is a spaghetti diagram in which the heights from each of the ensemble forecasts are plotted on the same chart. Here is it for 144 hr (Saturday at 4 PM). Look at the blue lines...each represents a different forecast...and nearly all show a nice ridge. This is strong hint that the atmosphere wants high pressure over the NE Pacific.

Bottom line: The atmosphere seems to be locked in a very anomalous pattern right now and my profession really can't explain it (and I would not take certain NY Times op-ed pieces about Siberian snow being the cause very seriously). Or other NY time pieces suggesting it is global warming. Whatever is going on seems to be overwhelming the normal La Nina pattern around here and over the rest of the western U.S. Our snowpack is below normal and California is wet....a situation normally associated with El Nino years. My profession has years of productive work ahead to figure all this out.

PS: It was very nice speaking to many of you at Weatherfest, which was a big success--perhaps 3-4 thousand people attended. And also thanks to all of you that have provided donations to my department, either for the fund to support our weather modeling, research, and web pages, or the other that helps our students.