jessica murray
my fall forecast was similar, but i'm not using any fancy models. it's not exactly divination, either. but, there's two things happening: you've got el nino pulling warm air up and you've got that blob exaggerating the pull of cold air down (the solar minimum has now passed). these are acting against each other. but, the difference is that el nino is a primary driver whereas the blob is a secondary one (that is, it exaggerates other things). the conclusion was to expect a mostly mild fall with shots of cold air. this is actually what the professionals here suggested, albeit with more complex formulas. they weren't wrong so much as they were off by a factor - el nino won the tug of war.

my winter forecast is actually that the conditions mostly hold. the graph needs to come down a few degrees, to account for less sunlight (and a colder ground). but, the basic idea of there being a tug of war between el nino and the polar vortex doesn't strike me as changing over the next few months. expect mostly warmer than average temperatures, with periodic blasts of arctic air.

also, i apologize - i should not have said that the solar minimum has passed. it is the opposite - the weak solar max has now passed. i was thinking of how weak the solar max was and jumbled the language. this is why editing posts is useful. we're actually now heading towards solar minimum, which should actually exaggerate the jet stream (on top of the blob, which may also be disappearing). it will be interesting to see what el nino looks like when we get to a more normal solar maximum and the factors begin to compound rather than cancel each other out. but, it's still a basic conflict in air masses and what we get will be determined by which air mass over powers the other.

www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/winter-is-coming-heres-how-we-develop-our-winter-forecast/60278/