One winter outlook is out - some wild weather ahead

NOAA just released their winter outlook in the last week and there's not much surprise to it if you understand what kind of conditions El Niño brings in winter. Typically, you get a warmer setup for the northern tier of the country and wet conditions across the southern tier. That basically matches what you'll see in their early predictions for December, January, and February (meteorological winter).

Keep in mind that there are two branches to the jet stream (a polar and a subtropical jet). It's the subtropical one that usually gets going and brings the wetter than average conditions to the southern US. 

And we hope that this year is no different because there are so many areas from Kansas to Texas and Louisiana that badly need the rain. 

Storm Team 12 will have a winter forecast coming out, but we will release ours closer to Thanksgiving. 

In the meantime, significant rainfall from Tuesday/Wednesday right over some of the state's worst drought conditions. It shouldn't be a surprise how much of that soaked in, but we also know there was some nice runoff too. This will not erase the drought entirely, but when we see the new map out in November, it will look a bit better over the Flint Hills. 

Final drought map of October looks like this:

November thoughts:

Daylight growing less and average rainfall continues to drop too. On average, northwest Kanas only expects about .50", and it's not much higher for southwest Kansas. Most of central and eastern Kansas averages 1-2"

In looking at lots of different model runs, it seems to me that November will mostly likely have "near average" temperatures when the month is complete. I don't see it being drastically colder or warmer, even though we will have small spells of both in the coming weeks. Despite the month starting off cooler than average, it won't stay that way. 

Moisture - I'm not seeing a big system just yet in the first 10-12 days of the new month. We may have a small system coming through during the first full week of November, and there are hints at something in the week of Thanksgiving. If you go off recent trends, one will think best chances of "above" normal rainfall would be focused in central and eastern Kansas (remember average is about 1-2" in November). The map below suggests southwest Kansas could be in the running for some better moisture. There are still plenty of changes going on with the patterns and the jet stream setup, so model errors can be quite large this time of year. Just sharing these images for full transparency, but reason to remain optimistic that the ongoing El Nino will continue to beef up the precipitation chances for the region. Even just having "average" moisture in a 30-45 day time span would be appreciated. 

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