I am growing particularly interested in the behaviour and trend we’re seeing with the NAO. Although still a long way off, the type of upcoming winter may already be shown and following the disappointment and bust of last year, I am wanting to look closely and show you what I’m seeing. For EUROPE that is since the US saw it’s coldest winter since 1996 and I did call on a cold/snowy winter!

Here’s an interesting and simple look at the positive and negative phases of the NAO seen dating back to 1950. The positive and negative phases correlate very nicely with our warmer and colder winter’s. Very cold winter’s tie in beautifully with downturn’s in the solar cycle which in turn drive the NAO value deeply negative. Like we saw last year, the opposite occurs during solar max’s.

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Take a look at the sunspot cycles below and notice how there’s a positive dominance with the NAO when there’s a peaking of the solar cycle and a negative dominance during minima. Here in Europe, like in the US, we saw warm winters around the 1990/91 (solar max), very cold (all-time record cold) in the mid-90s (solar min) and of course an even deeper min around 2009-10 which lead to a record negative NAO and cold eastern US/western Europe.  As you can see, the NAO was firmly positive last summer and winter right when sunspot cycle 24 was peaking but notice when the solar cycle tanks there’s an increase in negative NAO with the reversal of the QBO from west to east. Last winter saw strat warming’s over Asia which dumped the coldest air in the hemisphere over the eastern US but with a strong westerly QBO, caused by the solar max, there was no full scale strat warming or North Atlantic/Greenland block, just a powerful westerly flow into Europe, leading to a very warm/wet and stormy winter.

We’re now seeing the NAO tank and approach the -2 value, not seen since our coldest end to winter/start to spring in 50 years for the UK (winter 12-13). As you can see below, the sunspot cycle is decreasing. The question is, does the negative NAO trend continue and do we have enough influence from a DOWNTURN and not minimum to drive a negative NAO and thus, cold into western Europe in winter 2014-15.

Here’s what the positive NAO should look like in the upper height and temp anomaly charts (Last summer and winter)

The above is opposite this with a negative NAO.

Animation of recent 500mb heights, notice the strong positive showing up at the end over S Greenland.

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