A Spring Outlook

Well, I took a crack at winter this year a little more rigorously than in year's past, and I'll go over the results of that forecast sometime in the next week or two. Disappointed on the whole regarding the specific forecast, but I took quite a bit from this winter and following it on a larger scale day to day that will help me in the long run I think.

So with some of that in mind, I decided I would take a shot at Spring. Not an easy outlook, but I did find a few things to look at. We still have an El Nino in the Pacific, but it has begun the typical seasonal decline we typically see in late winter/early spring. Whether it completely fades away or not is another question entirely (mainly a question for summer anyway). El Ninos are difficult to try and make predictions for. But the computer model projections shown above indicate that at the very least a weak El Nino should be in place through all of spring.

Additionally, I did some research on some of the extreme atmospheric blocking we've seen this winter and if it correlates to anything in Spring, and there seems to be some agreement for blocking to at least maintain itself through mid-April in some fashion, albeit weaker. There were a handful of years where blocking really went to the opposite side of the scale starting as early as the first week in March. We are heading in that direction in the short term (not entirely going to the other side of the scale, but weakening considerably.

I looked at a number of other things as well, mainly experimenting to see if I find a useful method. I basically found the years where a number of trends were similar and bunched those years together, filtered out any that were completely opposite in the Pacific (La Nina instead of El Nino for instance) and used those as base analogs. I then looked at some things exclusive to the East and some things mainly dominant in the West and put some extra weight on those years for those regions and blended my analog ideas together for a national map.

So with that said, below you'll find my March, April and May temperature outlooks (click them to enlarge).

Additionally, I'm thinking wetter than normal conditions will persist in the South initially, though the focus may shift into the Southern Plains and Central Mississippi Valley this month, with continued generally wet conditions on the West Coast, Southwest and in the Mid-Atlantic/South Florida. There was a signal for a considerably drier than normal Gulf Coast as well, but I'm not entirely sure I believe it. We'll see. There was also a signal for a drier than average Ohio Valley and Northeast as well. Again, we'll see.

In terms of severe weather, climatology would favor active severe weather in the Southeast in a spring like this. In terms of tornadoes specifically, here are some findings based on the years I'm looking at:

- Well below the rolling three year average for March and April (138/194 tornadoes)
- And near to slightly below the rolling three year average for May (305 tornadoes), with a slight risk of above.
- Late April to Late May being the most active periods. The first period of activity looks to be around March 10th perhaps, with the models indicating a potentially potent Mid-Continent storm.
- Perhaps a greater than usual risk for significant tornadoes in the Southeast

That's my call and we'll see how it goes!