How Is the Weather?

Depending on who's making the argument, Columbus Day is either a celebration of Italian-American pride reflected in the heroics of an intrepid explorer or a day to celebrate the murderous colonization and imperialism of the white man over indigenous peoples everywhere.

But I'm not here to talk about that tonight.  I came here to talk about the weather.  The second half of October could get interesting, as tropical-weather experts - and the guys at The Weather Channel - have been hinting at the Caribbean Sea getting active again thanks to something called the Madden-Julian Oscillation, which sounds like a seventies rock band but is in fact a merging of atmospheric circulation and tropical deep convection that causes instability in the oceans and the seas near the Tropic of Cancer and this fuels tropical storms.

The Weather Channel's, um, experts are predicting that the MJO, as it's known (like the Bachman-Turner Overdrive is called BTO), will hover over the Caribbean Sea just east of Belize and possibly allow development of a storm that could become a hurricane and trek north, apparently toward the U.S. Gulf Coast . . . or maybe up the Eastern Seaboard.  This sounds sort of scary, as Hurricane Sandy formed off the cost of Nicaragua, just southeast of Belize. :-O

Meanwhile, New York meteorologist Joe Cioffi is calling attention to the fact that it's going to get very nippy outside in the Northeast by next weekend ,and he noted that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' (ECMWF) recent computer model  "shows something for early next week."  Not a tropical  system, but some sort of disturbance, apparently, in the upper Midwest.

A storm of sorts?  Something as powerful as a hurricane? Cioffi doesn't elaborate, but he does seem tho think we'll get a taste of winter earlier than we might want to.  maybe not snow, but possibly some cold, raw rain.  All very interesting, and all the more reason to wonder why, after the 2011 snowstorm and Sandy in 2012, we would actually hate to see October go.

This is not a forecast; this is all speculation. Keep calm and carry on.