Today’s long lead forecast from the Climate Prediction Center is pretty sweet:

May-July forecast, courtesy CPC

That’s May-July, and here’s a reminder about what the color blobs mean, because that swatch of green across New Mexico, where I live, can be a bit misleading. The CPC divides climatological history into three bins – 1/3 dry, 1/3 the middle, and 1/3 wet. An absence of color means odds are evenly spread across the three categories. – “EC” means “equal chances”. It doesn’t mean a forecast that those area’s are likely to have average precip, but rather just even chances of wet, middle or dry.

The light green across the Upper Colorado River Basin means the odds of wet increase from one in three to a 33-40 percent chance. The “A” and darker green across New Mexico and the mountains of southern Colorado means a greater than 40 percent chance of this year falling in that upper tercile, a “wet” year. So it’s a shift in the odds away from dry and toward wet, not a guarantee of wet.

Keep in mind that drought conditions here are deep, so layering a wet forecast on a dry landscape still leaves the map looking a bit droughty for the Four Corners and some of the key watersheds:

Drought outlook

Also interesting is the monsoon forecast:

July-September outlook, courtesy CPC

Boom!