NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center issued their latest monthly and seasonal outlooks for December 2019 and beyond earlier this week. They show a continuation of the trend towards warmer than normal temperatures both for December and for the December through February period. That does not mean that we won’t see cold outbreaks during the winter, just that overall warmer than normal conditions are expected to be more frequent than cold conditions. Since this is a probabilistic forecast, it also means that there is some chance that December and/or DJF could be below normal if we have a low-probability weather pattern.
Because we are in the neutral phase of the ENSO, there is little predictability on winter precipitation and so both December and DJF show EC for equal chances of above, near or below normal precipitation.
