Summer Outlook Preview

Just wanted to give a brief overview of my thoughts for summer. You can see the maps. All unofficial, but gives you an idea of where I'm coming from. Then a few quick notes.

It does look like the potential exists for the hottest summer in awhile on a national level. A lot of the analog (or similar) years I was finding were from the mid 80s to the mid 90s, which was a very warm period overall. And the best match years I found were warm overall. In addition, it is likely that El Nino's opposite, La Nina is beginning to form in the Equatorial Pacific. This traditionally lends to a hotter than normal summer.


Additionally, hurricane season should be busy...very busy. All the ingredients are on the table for an extremely active year. Many things can always go wrong, but the average of the best tropical years I found and the best temperature years I found was close to 14-15 storms, which included years outside of the recent active period.

My unofficial/official forecast is 16 named storms, 12 hurricanes and six major (Category 3 or higher) hurricanes. This is subject to and probably will change, so check back in on the next post...still have some fine tuning to do on that.

In the next day or two, I'll post a more detailed entry, going over....

a.) A verification of the winter and spring forecast maps, with some explanation as to what did and did not work.

b.) Risk factors associated with entering a potential La Nina period (weak vs. moderate vs. strong) as well as the risk if we never really make it to full fledged La Nina.

c.) More information on hurricane season.

d.) A quick look at what the current developments in the Pacific could mean for next winter.

Lastly, here's my primary analog list, with some tweaks and chiseling to how I weighted things here and there: 1953, 1979, 1984, 1987, 1998, 2003, 2007.

Thoughts, comments, questions...fire away.