Looking Out To March 1st

Even though large-scale trough remains over the West, it appears that main impacts locally will continue to be chilly temperatures and several windy periods for rest of February.

Graphics here are all from 00 UTC runs of global models and are valid at 00 UTC on March 1st. There is reasonable consistency in the GEFS 500 mb mean and spaghetti plots (above) . The most uncertainty at that time for CONUS U.S is over the west half of country. But real heaping amounts of spaghetti are piled over the North Atlantic and Europe.

Three of the GEFS member forecasts, plus the operational GFS, are shown below, with the operational GFS at upper left. The details of the western short waves have fairly large differences. The most interesting for us is the forecast at lower left, which is trying to dig a short wave over the ocean, rather than keeping things mostly over land. This would increase chance for a moist system during first week of March.

The operational ECMWF forecast (at bottom) appears fairly similar to the bottom right forecast from the GEFS. The ECMWF also looks promising wrt digging a short wave over the ocean. We will wait to see whether March starts out wet.