April 3rd

Just a quick update

Longer range outlook looking quite promising for chilly unsettled weather beginning about the 10th and continuing for a week.  Questions continue to be where the Trof axis is going to set up.  Gfs has it plenty far west for good April type storm, while Euro is a bit too Far East for good snow producer.  More later on this as the pattern hits just after Easter Sunday.

 

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Outside of some high clouds….This weekend will be very nice with high clouds and temps in the mid to upper 50s.  Mammoth winds will be up a bit and so it will be breezy Sunday into Monday but not cooler.  Amplifacation out over the pacific builds upper 500mb heights to anomalious levels next week, witch then progresses into Calfornia by mid week.   This sets the stage for some of the warmest weather so far this year. It just may hit 70 in Mammoth by Friday a week away!.  (Upper 80s in Bishop)  Lows at night now in the 30s will dip to freezing early then well into the upper 30s mid week.

 

Pattern:

Progressive with the upper jet favoring the Pacific NW into Monday next week. It then pushes upward into British Columbia Tuesday into early Wednesday. It then retreates to off the entire North American Coast Wednesday night into Friday the 8th.  The following weekend has the strong upper height anomaly pushing east from the far west with high clouds returning to CA and temps retreating that wekend.  Early the following week, the weather will become unsettled with wind, cooling and possibly showers.  High temps this weekend in the mid to upper 50s then low 60s by Tuesday and mid to upper 60s Wednesday though Friday, lows at night in the 30s.

 

ENSO:

Obviously there was a head-fake to climate scientests this past winter as La Nina was supposed to fade this Spring.   What actually happened, was a Kelvin Wave appearently faded in Late February and March with sub surface SSTs cooling between 140W and 170W. The demise of La Nina was supposed to occur over this Summer with the next EL Nino developing by the end of this year or during the WInter of 2023. That now has been pushed off timewise and we will have to get beyond “The Spring Barrier” to better understand when the “little girl” will leave.  In checking with some climate scientists, they indicated to me that it is not pertictulary unusual for La Nina to last three years.  However, 4 years would be unpresented based upon their comments.   So with that understood, La Nina should be leaving us at the latest, sometime in 2023, with the odds of an especially wet winter as early as 2023/24 Fall/Winter.  Just as a comment, We have wet La Ninas too.  However, La Ninas bias is always drier than normal for the southern half of CA.

For us in the high country, this is going to be an exceptionally dry summer. There is likley going to be horried forest fires in areas that have not burned yet. Locals should now stock up on HEPTA FAU filters for their homes and air purifier systems, KN 95 masks for our respiratory systems and just hope that many of the large burned areas of the forest already burned to the west and southwest of us, give us the protection we need. LIghting fires will be most concerning.  At the moment, the CFS, Climate Forecast System is showing a dry bias to AZ for the month of July. The ECMWF seasonal outlook will be out on the 5th of April.  So far it does not appear to be a wet monsoon season for the Desert Southwest.  With that said, dry based thunderstorms are the norm in the Eastern Sierra during the summer. We do not need monsoonal flow and dynamics to get thunderstorms. When it gets especially hot in July and August, heat spells are always followed by instability and dry afternoon thunderstorms. These are the primary fire-igniters of the forest.

 

Dr Howard and the Dweebs……………………….:-)