Per moving the discussion about long term climate in Austin from the update thread to this one, here is the PDF link that I found. I've not come across this before since it was released in 2014 but I'm really glad the city has already addressed this.
https://austintexas.gov/sites/defaul...s_research.pdf
I've studied meteorology and long term climate over the years and based on my own thoughts plus close observation, the city hit the hammer right on the nail. I'm about to get into some heavy technical meteorology stuff so bare with me, I'll try to explain as simply as I can but I won't go into tangents on specifics unless someone has a question. I'll also do my best to keep it moderately short.
One of my big talking points explaining to people why despite 2015 being the wettest year on record across the board not just locally but statewide, we still saw wildfires. 20-30 years ago we wouldn't have seen that. Well simply put, we are seeing too much rain falling in a month's time or over a couple of months then we have extremely dry stretches for a month or longer in between. Add to that an increase in evaporation and we end up with a situation where the soil moisture doesn't last as long as it once did.
Look at what is happening right now with this extended dry spell despite being in an El Niño winter which typically (however not always) is wet to very wet and typically cooler mainly due to extended cloud cover rather than arctic intrusions. Due to unusual planetary patterns occurring in seasons they don't normally occur or during certain climate cycles such as El Niño we are experiencing abnormal weather here as well as throughout the world. A good example is the MJO which normally becomes non existent during El Niños especially moderate to strong ones yet there's been a well developed MJO with this El Niño, a monster of a niño at that. Rather than experiencing winter el niño weather patterns we are seeing weather more in line with what we see during La Niña.
Now there are some other factors which come into play that we have seen occure with past powerful niños which look to be typical with really poweful ones. One analog which has been mentioned being similar to this niño is the 57-58 niño in which we started with an very wet spring followed by a very dry summer and early autumn then a wet period from the last half of October through the first week of January then drying out through most of Febuary before the rains returned at the end of February with a cooler wetter spring following. Sure there are times when patterns align with past patterns. The difference now as opposed to then is the overall temperature is higher now and we experienced more extreme conditions as opposed to 57-58. Now will we continue to align with that analog going into spring this year? It's quite possible and there are indications that we will finally see a pattern shift by next weekend. Having said that, we can't just assume historical analogs will continue to be used in helping to forecast future patterns. They will become less useful.
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