October – November – December Forecast

The feature image is sunset last night from the Muskegon GLERL Cam. I added the Beaver Island and Mac Bridge cams to the side bar.

We ended up the month of September as our driest month of the year with less than 3/4 of an inch of rain here in Otsego. I was out raking leaves and mowing yesterday morning – very dry and kicked up a lot of dust. I don’t burn the leaves. We are lucky enough to live in the woods so we have plenty of room for composting.

We will have some rain in the Tuesday night/ Wednesday time-frame as the cold front is moving faster than anticipated in earlier forecasts – there are still conflicting data in the various model runs for Friday and Saturday but the GEFS and GFS models are still showing around an inch or so of rain for this week. Hopefully this will hold true.

Here in Allegan County we have been blessed with a bit more rain than some of the other areas in lower Michigan, here is the data from my station:

Our last dry spell was in July after the 14th when we only received .11 of an inch through August 2nd. These are the rainfall totals from my station since March of this year:

March 5.51 Inches
April 5.9 inches
May 2.44 inches
June 7.57 inches
July 2.84 inches (most of this in the first half of the month)
August 4.52 inches
September .58 (our driest month)

It is time to look at the forecast for the last three months of this year, hard to believe we are heading towards the end of another year with winter just around the corner. We have been in a warmer than normal pattern for quite a long time due to the neutral ENSO (El Nino/Southern Oscillation) which is likely to persist through the rest of Autumn. There are increasing chances of a transition to La Nina conditions late into the fall through the winter of 2017/2018.

During the past 5 weeks the sea surface temperatures have decreased over the central and eastern equatorial Pacific though I don’t think we will see its effects until late November. That said I am thinking perhaps we may actually have a real winter this year as we move past Thanksgiving into December according to the prognostics of the Pacific SSTs. A lot more goes into the winter forecast, thus this is an early outlook and things will be more clear come November.

Below are the CPC outlooks for the rest of the year into spring:

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October – November – December