What is the LRC?
To put it simply, weather has patterns that repeat. This is not new, since the 1940’s scientists and meteorologists have discovered many repeating patterns in our weather.
El Niño, La Niña and the Artic Oscillation you’ve probably heard of. There are others that we will discuss below.
Gary Lezak at Diamond Peak, Lake Tahoe
The LRC stands for Lezak’s Recurring Cycle, named after Gary Lezak, who discovered this forecasting method in the late 1980’s.
While working as a meteorologist for an Oklahoma City television station the winter of 1987-88, it clicked. Oklahoma City had two 12-inch snowstorms that winter that looked eerily similar to how they set up and developed.
This led to a theory that 15 years later, participants from KSHB 41 Weather Blog, in Kansas City, coined the term “LRC” (Lezak’s Recurring Cycle).
How it works: Patterns begin to emerge each fall as the jet stream begins to move south, from its minimum in late summer. When this happens, a pattern begins to develop from the unique temperature differences in the Artic. Anchor troughs and anchor ridges develop and shape how the jet stream flows.
This pattern becomes established and repeats until early fall when the process starts over again. No pattern is the same and cycle lengths vary each year and generally run between 40 to 65 days. Last year’s pattern was 45 days.
Weather Influences
1. The LRC The LRC is the biggest influence on our weather. What follows below are the other influences on our weather pattern and how they affect it.
The other pieces of the atmospheric puzzle are called teleconnections. We talked about the Artic Oscillation (AO) and El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) above, but there are other influences on our weather. The Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO), Pacific North American Pattern (PNA), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) are the major influences. All of these teleconnections affect the outcome of weather each cycle.
2. El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
The biggest influence ENSO has on our weather pattern is the flow of the jet stream. The differences between the global circulation between El Nino and La Nina affect precipitation patterns across the globe. 
3-4. The Artic Oscillation (AO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)
These two influences deal with temperature.
The other influences, such as the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) affect the fuel for storms. The MJO is an eastward moving phenomenon in the tropics. This influences weather in the western Pacific, adding moisture fueling storms or drawing energy away from the western Pacific in certain phases.
The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) affects the temperature of the Indian Ocean, which in turn affects the strength of the MJO.
What does this year’s pattern look like? 
Early Pioneers
Before LRC theory evolved, Jerome Namias published many articles on what he termed “The Index Cycle” in the 1940’s, that was just on the cusp of discovering the cycling weather pattern.
Namias has a very interesting backstory. Born in 1910, he had a full ride scholarship to Wesleyan University in Connecticut but stayed home to take care of his ailing father. After a bout of tuberculosis that lasted nearly 5 years, he attended MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and received a master’s degree in 1941. 
While at MIT, he came across another giant in the field of meteorology, Carl-Gustaf Rossby.
Rossby was the first to describe large scale movements in the atmosphere that he compared to fluid mechanics. He demonstrated that long waves in the jet stream and westerlies followed the same rules that govern fluid mechanics. Those waves were later named Rossby Waves and are a fundamental building block of the LRC.
The influence of Rossby and the work Namias collaborated with on Carl’s breakthrough paper in 1939 titled “Relation between variations in the intensity of the zonal circulation of the atmosphere and the displacements of the semi-permanent centers of action” led to the development of the Index Cycle.
The LRC is Published
This phenomenon has led Gary to publish a peer reviewed journal titled Cycling Weather Patterns in the Northern Hemisphere
