Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Will the Atmosphere Synchronize at the Start of 2006?

Same old story with our weather-climate situation. Strong basin-wide extended north Pacific polar jet stream with several weather systems continues. Meanwhile, tropical convection is consolidating and intensifying around 110 east, and moving into the southern hemisphere (as part of the seasonal cycle). At the time of this writing (~0100 UTC 22 December 2005), the centroid of the large thunderstorm clusters was at about 2S/110E.

Monitoring of numerous fields in the equatorial tropics suggests that the magnitude of the stationary response to the above mentioned forcing is strengthening (yes, there is a La-Nina component to all this as suggested by the SSTs). This includes rising (falling) mean sea level pressures across the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean (Indian Ocean) with increasing surface easterlies (westerlies). Even though an infinite number of possibilities exist as to what path the atmosphere is on (including not going anywhere), "low odds" seem to favor the tropics and extratropics to "sync up" by the start of 2006. This would suggest a transition from the split flow, ridge conditions currently across western North America to more troughs particularly across the Rockies and Plains in about 10 days (around New Year's Day). We will just see what happens.

For southwest Kansas, well above normal temperatures and dry for at least the next 5-7 days can be expected. Should the changes mentioned above come to pass, colder than normal temperatures and above normal precipitation would be most probable around the first week of 2006 for much of the Plains.

Please note: I will try to do another writing at least once during about the next week. However, it may not be until the middle of next week I am able to post another discussion due to the Christmas Holiday.

Happy Holidays to everyone!
Ed Berry

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