October 2009 3rd Coldest for US in 115 Years, What about the Upcoming Winter?

I got a lot more back from Joe D’Aleo than I expected. He doesn’t take credit for last year’s (or this year’s) OFA forecast, but I think the OFA was strongly influenced by his article.
He adds:
I did not do the Old Farmer’s Almanac Forecast last year or this year, only a story on natural factors in climate change last year.
I do the forecast each winter for other applications and sites using many different factors as was noted. The forecasts used to appear on Intellicast where I was Dr. Dewpoint and then used successfully as a partner in a hedge fund for 3 years before all the markets went crazy which caused us to disband just in time (even though we were ranked #2 among 167 funds the first two years). I am using the same technique in an Ag forecasting effort for WSI now (I helped them develop statistical models for seasonal forecasting for their energy market in the early 2000s).
We correctly caught the Indian and southeast Asian monsoon issues, the drought in Argentina this year, the flooding in central Brazil, the cold wet springs and summers the last two years with delayed plantings and harvests, the drought in the southeast and then south central US the last two years.
I present the winter forecast and do snow forecasts for Boston each year at the Boston NWS Winter Weather Workshop for the media. I called the cold snowy 2000/01 winter, explained the 2001/02 on the basis of the strong second solar max (which leads to ultraviolet induced ozone production and warming in low and mid latitudes and a ‘zonal’ winter). Based on the head of NWS seeing that presentation, I was invited to talk to CPC in October 2002 where I explained the importance of inputting actual solar conditions into climate AND forecast models. We showed that during high solar flux periods, the model errors varied with a correlation of over 70% with one month delays). The models consider input into the top to be constant.
During that meeting, I predicted a cold and snowy eastern US winter. I was told that I would be wrong, it was a “slam dunk warm winter’ forecast. It ended up as I predicted. I was invited back the next year but my company refused.
We had a strong signal for the frigid cold in January’s 2004 and 2005 and December 2005. We also called for Katrina’s track two days ahead of TPC.
When I returned to WSI, in 2008 we went for very cold and snowy winters and springs in the northwest and north central and northeast the last two winters.
This winter we are in transition with a few key factors. We have an El Nino that will likely fade after early December, are in a background PDO state but may be slightly positive due to the El Nino early, we have very low solar, a warm tripole in the Atlantic (favors negative NAO), some leftover effect of Redoubt and Sarychev (favors negative NAO/AO) and a QBO that is transitioning slowly to east from top (30mb) to bottom (50mb). East QBOs mean a trough from east central US to northern Europe and storms that head out to sea south of where they go in west El Nino (a little like what Ida’s remains will do).
East QBO low solar years favor stratospheric warmings, which also favor negative AO/NAO and a long stretch of below normal.
Negative AO and NAO means cold. The most similar years had coldest relative to normal month January. Some of the years were warmer in December western and central especially.
Those years were drier than most El Ninos in California and Texas but wetter along Gulf and southeast coast and in Florida. Lots of lake effect snows.
One big wildcard is the solar. No analogs since 1950 have been this extreme, maybe more like one of the winters in the early 1900s or better yet late 1700s, early 1800s.