Good Monday and Happy Labor Day. Many of you are enjoying a three day weekend, but for your friendly weatherdude, it’s just another manic Monday. With cookouts and picnics being all the rage of the day, I’ve decided to put together one heck of a weather menu for this update.

We will fire up the grill for some shot-range stuff to start whet your appetites. After that, let’s move on to a nice helping of fall chill on the way by this weekend. To top off our weather cookout, how about a cold one? Of course, I’m talking about winter and a look at some of the new seasonal forecast models.

Hot off the grill is the weather we have out there today and into Tuesday. This is pretty much a continuation of the obnoxious temps we’ve had much of the holiday weekend. Watch for scattered storms.

The storm threat increase later Tuesday night into Wednesday as a cold front moves in. This front will slow down as low pressure develops along it. This should bring some needed rains to the region.

MUCH cooler air then swings in here by the end of the week into the weekend. Our temps go well below normal for much of this time. Highs may struggle to get into the low and middle 70s for some on a day or two…

Euro 2

Lows in the 40s are a good possibility for many…

GFS Temps

It’s once into next week that we find the models going back into flip and flop mode. The latest European Model offers up a tropical system from the Gulf of Mexico…

Euro

After how the models handled Erika, I would take that with a gain of salt. I will say one thing… the pattern across North America looks like it wants to get pretty darn active in the coming weeks!

I’ve made no secret on how intriguing this big daddy El Nino is to me. I’ve harped on what I thought would happen with it since the spring and I still can’t find any true analog for it.

The warmest Pacific waters continue to slowly spread west along the equator and away from South America. That’s a trend that should continue over the next several months. This shows up well with the NASA model forecast for the upcoming winter…

NASA

I’ve highlighted the warmest anomalies in the white box. You can clearly see how the warmest water relative to normal is well to the west of South America. The black box features the huge warm pool of water off the west coast of North America and into the Gulf of Alaska. That’s been there since the fall of 2013 and has, in my view, been the biggest driver of the weather across the United States. That warm pool promotes ridging up along the west coast and into Alaska and Canada. In turn, we get troughs to develop across the eastern US.

Some are trying to compare this El Nino to the El Nino of 1997. That too was a monster, but that’s where the similarities end for me. Here’s a look at the ocean temp anomalies from late December of 97…

SST

You can see how much farther east the warmest water was along the equator. Not only that… look at the water off the west coast and into the Gulf of Alaska. Not even close to what the seasonal models are forecasting for this winter.

Now, we have to point out that the 1997 map is reality while the map above it is only a forecast for the same time period.

So what does the NASA model say for temps? It shows a winter that’s overall cold, but really grows colder the deeper we get into it…

NASA 2

The first map is for December-February with the map below it showing January-March.

If we look at the new Canadian Sips model, we find a similar progression through the winter with a mean trough in the east and southeast…

Canadian 5

Thanks for dropping by my little backyard weather cookout and have a safe trip home.

Happy Labor Day and take care.