Southern California Weather Force has issued an update to the previous issued final forecast for the 2023-2024 winter season and remains to be anything but a normal El Nino.
El Nino is the warming of the Equatorial Pacific Ocean from South America to near Australia. The last strong El Nino we had like this was the 1997-1998 season, however does El Nino really work the way ‘they’ say? I will tell you now that both El Nino and La Nina do not work how you think.
Just because an El Nino is called does not mean El Nino means more rain for the Southwestern United States. Just last year, I called La Nina to be above average in rainfall and every other thought it would be drier and look what happened.
I see a season where we have a very strong Eastern Canadian low and a strong ridge of high pressure in the Northeast Pacific Ocean between Alaska and Washington State.
This combination will bring a strong northwest to southeast jet out of the north and provide the Desert Southwest with extremely cold temperatures as an average, even having record low temperatures across the entire region.
One thing I am seeing is this pattern will have a strong temperature gradient along with upper-level jet dynamics to bring some of the strongest and coldest Santa Ana Wind Events, numerous in fact. We have not seen these for many years now, but this year should easily bring these.
The first of the Santa Ana Winds will start just before Halloween as previous stated in my initial forecast for this winter, which again has not changed. This should be a couple days give or take a day just before Halloween. If you have decoration and live in a Santa Ana Wind prone zone then continue to monitor the next forecast, which will be issued sometime later this week.
Get used to it, these winds will be the center of attention for most of this season. We will still have average to below average rainfall, but I do not see it being extremely dry. Still, I see a good 8-14″ of rainfall, with 10″ being the margin in Los Angeles for this season along with low-elevation snowfall events, which is not an El Nino, more of a La Nina in terms of what ‘their’ definition is.
In Addition to this pattern, rogue storms within the pattern would set up across Southern California and then move south into Northern Mexico, which will put this season average for Phoenix and above average in precipitation for Tucson, and areas north being average to below.
That is the forecast for Southern California, which again is way different than what El Nino should provide according to records. However, I’ve said this before ‘they’ (NOAA idgits) base El Nino and La Nina off the strong events of 97-98 and 98-99, with no real research on other years.
Master General Meteorologist – Raiden Storm
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