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Next, let’s take a look at the Significant Events for the month of December. If you click on the image below, you will able to view the full report for this month.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Next, let’s examine the 500mb Height and Anomaly map. When you look at the 500mb map, you can get a sense where ridges and troughs setup. The shades of red indicate ridging, while the shades of blue indicate troughing.<\/p>\n Let’s compare December of this year to last year. Notice how much ridging extended over the Pacifc Northwest southeastward toward the East Coast. All the shades of blue, which indicate troughing was up over Canada and Greenland. Click on the image to see December of 2010. What you’ll notice is that the upper air\u00a0flipped, where ridging took up shop over Greenland.. No doubt, this year is a different story, where blocking just hasn’t developed.\u00a0 Next, let’s take a look from last year as we went from December to January of this past year. As you can see, it was a favorable pattern for colder and snowier pattern over the Eastern portions of the Middle Atlantic and Northeast US.\u00a0 One of the themes to note on these analyses was how much ridging took place over Greenland.\u00a0 At this time the NAO and AO were negative, which is\u00a0very critical for a cold and snowy pattern.\u00a0 So far this current\u00a0winter season, we have not seen that happen.\u00a0\u00a0These are just\u00a0some of the themes I’m noting for folks over the Eastern US.\u00a0 If you go back to last year, there were two major winter storms, December 26-The Boxing Day Storm, and January 26th.\u00a0 So, all the ingredients to get the big winter storms were\u00a0very favorable.\u00a0\u00a0No doubt, this\u00a0winter has been not so favorable.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
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