North America is surrounded by hot water which normally creates a colder and stormier late winter and early spring from the Great Lakes to the East Coast and hotter conditions with rainfall extremes in the western portions of the continent.

There is a reason North America is in trouble if it is surrounded by hot water. It’s because this means winter will be really cold!

Huh?

When the continent is surrounded by hot water, as it is now, the western regions are typically hot and cold Arctic air slams deep into the central and eastern potions of the US and Canada. The majority of North America experiences colder weather and the West Coast experiences floods, heat and, in some areas, droughts.

Most of the North Atlantic waters are warmer than average, with the waters off the East Coast ranging from 2 ‒ 7°F (1 - 4°C) above normal, with the warmest wa­ters off of the Northeast states and Atlantic Provinces. This produces extremely variable temperatures.

In December, the warmth from these waters wafted inland, warming tempera­tures from the East Coast to the Midwest. However, when the cold air from the Arctic plunged south, it hit this warm, wet air and the moisture precipitated out in a strong storm. The wind chill impact chilled the al­ready cold air, creating a spectacular storm. Just ask Boston.

Don’t expect a repeat of last year’s “Polar Vortex” winter. The weather is following the typical pattern for weak El Niño conditions. Hot waters off in the tropics are spreading up the West Coast. As winter evolves, the frozen Arctic air mass cannot drop south over the warm Pacific/Western North Amer­ica, so it plunges deep into the Midwest and Great Lakes area. The prevailing westerly winds carry the cold air east until it collides with the warm, moist Atlantic air. From mid-December to mid-January, the East was so warm that the stormy collisions were mostly in the middle of the continent. As winter progressed, the cold moved east and the storms stretched in a band from Texas to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

And:

Expect the weak El Niño pattern to continue through winter into early spring. Typically the Great Lakes have above aver­age ice cover and help keep the Great Lakes regions as well as much of the Midwest and Northeast cool in early spring. This normally leads to the warm waters of the Atlantic reheating the land and springtime ends with unusually warm weather. Typi­cally this forms a good start for Midwestern and Great Plains croplands and pastures, with some planting delays compensated for by warmer late springtime temperatures.

David Fuller's view

Here is the Browning Newsletter.

Every time I see this publication it reminds me that predicting Mother Nature’s medium to longer-term patterns is even more difficult than forecasting market trends of similar duration.