Possible development of El Nino in late '09..thoughts??

[si33]

Brrrrrr!!

[susancruzs]

I haven't been in TR that long so I've never experienced a warmer than normal summer! Locals do complain about the humidity but that goes with the territory, it is the midwest!

[si33]

This is true...and Wisconsin is not as bad as Kansas or Oklahoma at that time..I couldn't believe how much i could sweat the first year i lived there..You did get used to it after awhile though..

..Plus, all that humidity made for some awesome Electrical storms...even if they came in the dead of night..

[susancruzs]

I stayed at a B & B in TR before I moved, huge Victorian home, surrounded by all these trees, right near the river and I think I came straight up out of bed one night!

My first big storm in TR and it was amazing. With the lake and 2 rivers, unbelievable thunder and lightning. I love watching storms roll in, awesome!

[si33]

I totally agree...what was weird was that every so often, especially on really hot nights we'd have some of the strangest storms ive ever witnessed..

i vividly recall one night when what sounded like a gas tanker exploding just outside my window woke me out of a dead sleep... For the next hour or so I sat there watching the weirdest lightning light up the sky...

Now, while id seen and chased all sorts of different storms in the time i had lived there ( in KS ) the shape, rate, and duration of each strike that night seemed quite different then anything id experienced before..

First off..there was barely any rain,..more of a drizzle then anything..
Each of the the lightning bolts themselves were wildly contorted ..some looked like handfulls of cooked Spaghetti. id never observed anything like this in most other storms before.. and every extremely brief flash resulted in the loudest thunder id ever heard...i swore at least 10 houses within my neighborhood had taken direct hits...at least twice during the course of this event... There was absolutely no wind.. or any other severe weather associated with this storm..In fact, the strange,overall "errie-ness" was a little unnerving..

How weird it was that after such intensity..The storm suddenly ceased..
Only a couple more times there,..and once while i lived in OH, under the same weather conditions have i experienced something similar..
..Infact, the storm i saw in Ohio became so intense that i literally got off my bed and slept on my floor that night and this is coming from someone who loves to watch lightning..and isn't afraid of standing out in the open, with a camera and metal tri pod to get spectacular shots..

....At its heigth, i swear that i was recording 85+ strikes per 5 minaute period..and this lasted for about 30-40 minautes!! Truely intense..

Ive spent of time in the past trying to research this type of storm..just to see if there actually exists a sub class of thunderstorm which is so wildly energetic, yet doesn't include the high winds, hail, rain and tornadoes associated with other intense t- storm types..dry or high base thunderstorm?..maybe..but id seen plenty of those..and none of them were quite as "electrical" as these were..and in another event, there was a humid boundry near by..that night, i recorded 150 individual flashes in a 5 min. period..over the course of two hours as the storm moved along the northward-advancing boundry just to my south..

the only thing i came up with thus far is that these events i described, amongst similar events, occured during years surrounding a La Nina..
perhaps there's a connection?..

[RichardW]

I hope so. We in England get hotter summers in El Nino year, hotter as in, over 80 degrees on at least 3 days in the summer

I HOPE La Nina does not re-develop. It tossed up our summers 2007 and 2008 (wettest and dullest on record respectively) and they were also very cold. I will book June-August in bloody Mexico if we get La Nina buggering up summer again.

Also, while La Nina brings more rain to our shores, we have a distinct lull in thunderstorm activity. 2008 saw a pathetic 11 days with thunder, lowest since 2001.

In fact looking at the statistics there is a direct correlation in the UK between La Nina/El nino and annual thunderstorm days, with some el nino years seeeing over 20 days of thunder and la nino years with under 10!

[§AB]

^^ La Nina has pretty much the same effect here. Cooler summers, less storms, more rain.

However, it hasn't rained in over 3 weeks here.

[si33]

we just statred getting a little rain again..after being dry..and in the 70's over the past 10 days..very unusual for our area..even so,..no one complained..i certainly diddn't

[susancruzs]

Interesting post about storms but standing out with a metal tripod si33! Geesh, scares me!

I learned alot about storms going to a talk the national weather service put on at the local college I had no clue on the types of thunder storms. My father took us down to the lake as kids when there was a NE wind to see the waves and taught us not to be afraid of storms but to respect what they could do.

[si33]

ENSO update..

After looking over some recently updated info,..its looking like things might start to get interesting in the coming months..

While the expected pattern is looking more neutral over the pacific,there are some interesting things which bear watching over the spring and summer (Nor. hemisphere) months..

A key indicator which tracks certain fluctuations known as the SOI index consecutively remained in neutral territory over the past 14 days. this is signifigant because such levels had not been seen since last June when they were briefly pointing towards very early signs of a developing El Nino..

A large bank of warmer water in the Western pacific has been repeatedly attempting to progress eastward across the equatorial pacific and at last report had reached to about the international date line before getting hung up there..

Winds over the entire tropical pacific have quieted considerably, with marked decrease in the influence of the westerly-flowing wind patterns..and more occasional bursts of eastward flowing winds..such a quiet pattern is also indicitive of a neutral phase of the MJO cycle..including in the Indian ocean..

While most of these signals are generally reflective of a decreasing LA Nina,..if, over the next several months, the SOI index continues to remain neutral..and the warmer pool of sub surface water continues beyond its current 165w location,..and can over take the cooler pool of water entrenched just east of that locale,..this could be the potential beginning of an El nino later on as any warming will take several months to begin to really influence overall conditions..

The tragic events surrounding the massive firestorms in Australia are also of some interest as there has been talk of a connection between this weather cycle preceeding the evolution of past El Nino events..Whether this is true is questionable but something to keep in mind..The 82-83 event was an event cited to possibly have such a connection.

In any event..stay tuned..