Negative Arctic Oscillation -- here we go again -- December 2010

Well, folks, we are predicted to go down to a negative 6 or 7, although these forecasts seem to have about as much confidence as weather forecasts. http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao_index_ensm.shtml The daily AO indices are shown for the previous 120 days, and the ensemble forecasts of the daily AO index at selected lead times are appended onto the time series. The indices are standardized by standard deviation of the observed monthly AO index from 1979-2000. A 3-day running mean is applied to the forecast time series. The values at the upper left and right corners of each figure indicate the mean value of the AO index and the correlation coefficients between the observations and the forecasts, respectively. The first panel shows the observed AO index (black line) plus forecasted AO indices from each of the 11 GFS ensemble members starting from the last day of the observations (red lines). The ensemble mean forecasts of the AO index are obtained by averaging the 11 GFS ensemble members (blue lines), and the observed AO index (black line) is superimposed on each panel for comparison. For the forecasted indices (lower 3 panels), the yellow shading shows the ensemble mean plus and minus one standard deviation among the ensemble members, while the upper and lower red lines show the range of the forecasted indices, respectively.