Winter Teaser Part 2: My Initial Thoughts on Jet Stream

It is becoming likely that my winter forecast will be based on a weak El Nino (warm water off western South America), weak PDO (cold water off northern Pacific Coast, warm water out to sea), and a Moderate AMO (warmer than normal Atlantic). The reason I am not releasing it until Sept. 1st is that I want to continue to see what the models project for these patterns. But for another clue, I ran an analysis of the years that had all of these ocean characteristics above and where the jet stream was in those years. The result is the image below.

I outlined on this graphic where I am beginning to think the northern and southern branch of the jet stream will set up for this winter. The top red dashed black outlined streak is the northern branch, the bottom the southern branch. As you can see it looks like we might have two very active jet streams but they will diverge over the east coast as shown by the arrows I put at the end of each branch. This sets up a battle zone over the East Coast where there will be potential for storms to form, but also potential for warm spells too. If you like snow the good news is that under this scenario it is likely the two jet streams will merge from time to time over the eastern third of the country producing big storms. I outlined high pressure to the north which will prevent these storms from escaping out to sea. 

That's all for now, the detailed winter forecast will be out Sept. 1st.