Most of us are interested in improving the accuracy of forecasting winter temperature ,looking particularly for cold winters and the increased snow risk this brings.
There are however two hurdles to jump.The first is being able to forecast the AO or NAO. The METO NAO forecasts we believe achieve ,using a number of variables ,66% accuracy this being measured in terms of getting the correct sign for the NAO index.The advantage of the OPI to AO route is that it uses only one variable and appears to have a remarkably high correlation to the AO. However at present we do not know what forecasts were made for the AO only what actually happened.
The second hurdle is this-even if we could forecast the AO or NAO with total accuracy how does this translate into CET? On the NAO front the correlation between NAO and CET is 0.66.If we look at the 50/51 to 13/14 data, taking the lower values <1.5 there are 15 winters and 13 of them finished up cold( ie below mean.However given the sample size is small and the correlation between NAO and CET values is only 0.35
If we now look at AO v CET the overall correlation is very similar to that of the NAO 0.67.Taking the lower values and using <1.5 gives 8 winters 60,63,66,69,70,77,86,09.Of these 6 finished up cold but correlaltion is weak at 0.25.So statistically the the links are weak.
However we now have fascinating live experiment.The OPI points towards a AO- winter.It would be good to have the METO NAOforecast when it is made usually some time in November if anyone can get hold of it!