Monday, November 03, 2014

Typhoon Rule: 1976 vs 2014 Mid- November Cold

I've been doing some checking on the Typhoon Rule and compared it to events of the past.  So I checked to see if there was a recurving Typhoon in early November in 1976 since this was one of our analog years for this winter.  Sure enough, there was one:  Typhoon Louise.

So I plotted the surface temps and 500mB anomalies for Nov 1976 period.


The temperatures over the 12 days from Nov 12th to 22nd show the strongest cold air from the 21st to the 24th including three straight days below freezing with some accumulating snow!



The following map is the current setup for the current Typhoon and the temps for mid week next week only 6 days after the Typhoon starts to recurve.  They look similar to 1976! 

I want to reiterate that it's not the Typhoon that causes the cold air/eastern trough.  It's the overall pattern that I'm watching. The typhoon is just one element of it. Let's see if the cold air pans out next week.  Will we see our first lake effect snow of the season?