I did the Swamp Postcard this week as usual, though of course anxiety rates are up in the Last Week before something happens. I got a note back from a very smart pal. She thought I had assumed a stark perspective on things as they progressed in this marvelous election campaign. I nodded in agreement with her assessment, since I knew where it was coming from.

She thought I was being too reactive to the fringes on the political spectrum who seem to desire tearing down the government of our constitutional republic. I nodded in agreement, but sighed. By training, I was always conditioned to consider likely outcomes and always have a “worst case” plan in the hip pocket just in case things didn’t work out the way we thought. One of the key factors in those sorts of things was something happening somewhere else: weather.

I had to chuckle as I started some meteorological research about next week’s weather. My old boss Vince was smart about those factors that impact planning. I will never forget being on the analytic watch and becoming a little agitated when the Soviet units around Socotra Island in the Indian Ocean started to become active, and the INTS we watched pulsed with signals. I thought they might be mobilizing for something that could involve us.

Vince gave a shrug and said: “Check the weather out there.” We did, and sure enough, there was some bad weather that suggested a prudent skipper was getting prepared. It was a normal and natural thing. I incorporated that into the personal check-list as a fundamental part of planning.

The election even gets around to that, but I acknowledge the torrent of political invective has helped form my view of current events. Part of that is generational, of course, and another thing I should have incorporated into my mental processing. We Boomers have been through the generational thing before, and it shouldn’t be an unexpected thing as it happens again. In the 1960s, we challenged our parents and their prehistoric perspective and attitudes. You know, the ones that included that horrid-big war, and a Grandmother who asked her kids to walk along the tracks home from school. If the kids found any lumps of coal on the ground from the trains, bring it home.

That all seemed big then, and it took them a while to get used to our new world that we built up until we replaced theirs. Now it is being done to us, and it brings me to a sort of mild dystopia in analyzing the daily news. The world has already changed, and it causes curious lurches in my understanding. I don’t mind things have changed- I lived in the world we made, and now I am going to have to get used to living in someone else’s. This isn’t as much fun as the 60s.

I think my pal believes that if Mr. Biden is elected, the mostly-peaceful crowds will go home, things will get back to normal, and we can make some necessary changes to improve our collective lives. More power to her. I have my doubts, but maybe things will work out fine. They usually have, with a couple glaring exceptions.

But this is about weather, as the persistent drops on the roof remind me. Since we have followed many of the streams of information crafted to meet the needs of the season, I went to a non-political source. Weather has become another political thing, so caveat emptor. Since gentle Socotra readers deserve the best, I examined several best regional forecasts for conditions on November 3rd. There is some good news there, and I present the chart from the world-leading European Center model for the next few days for your planning.

The jet stream wrinkles across North America like several limp but fast-moving sausages, mostly north of the line above the Western states. The forecast for election day is “extreme.” That is in keeping with the recent storm activity, but in this case, better described as “extremely pleasant, with minimal storminess and precipitation.”

In support of this view, I have the EC ensemble model predictions that are run 51 times with slightly differing assumptions and then averaged for accuracy. The average (or mean) of these ensemble forecasts is usually a good prediction. In the average, anyway.

A HUGE area of high heights/pressures looks like it will dominate nearly the entire U.S. on election day, with warmer and dry conditions across the west. No rain, like today in the Old Dominion. Sunshine. If you haven’t, it looks like a good day to go vote.
Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com