Hoosier

We are having one for the weekend by God. I don't care if it's a pencil thin band.

While it hasn't been as torchy as late December (not a hard thing to accomplish since it was so far above average then), 2020 is off to a pretty mild start. Generally speaking, the mins have been farther above average than the maxes in the region, though there are some pretty significant positive departures with the maxes as well. Also, thought I would bump this map that I posted a while back. Pretty clear that the timeframe on this map is going to end up warmer than average in a lot of the N area, and substantially so. Not to bust on CPC, but I wonder why the warm signal was missed?

The downside to basically leaving the southern stream wave to its own devices is a fairly narrow area of wintry precip. We've had a tough time getting proper phases though so I'm almost ready to try anything

Good post RC. Should be cold enough on the northwest fringe for snow/ice, so the bigger concern is how that southern wave tracks. Would be a kick in the pants to get missed to the south right after the other storm passes too far north.

It's been pretty bad. Haven't even had a 3" snowfall yet. At least my total to date finally broke 6"

Well, the high is indeed retreating eastward, but modeled surface winds are still easterly at that time, and it's overnight/early morning timing. Perhaps a plausible situation, but good luck getting anything to lock in at this distance haha.

Lol at the system on the GFS around day 10.

Yeah, thought there could be some isolated amounts near 6", but it was even heavier than that and a more widespread band of decent amounts. Nice system for some folks. Ended up just over 1" here.

Do you have any early thoughts on March/April by any chance? Just very general ideas, like a normalish transition to spring or a winter that hangs on?

Another episode of Chicago snowfall futility, brought to you by me. I had to get a little creative with this one since the early season snows have helped to put the ultimate low mark out of reach, and also did not want to get too far ahead of myself by writing off the entire month of January. So, this is least snowfall from November 15 to January 15. If less than 2" additional occurs through January 15, then a top 10 (or should we say bottom 10) mark will be achieved. 1.3", 11/15/2012 to 1/15/2013 1.7", 11/15/2001 to 1/15/2002 2.0" 11/15/2019 to 1/3/2020 2.4" 11/15/1912 to 1/15/1913 2.6" 11/15/1889 to 1/15/1890 2.7" 11/15/1936 to 1/15/1937 3.5" 11/15/1923 to 1/15/1924 3.6" 11/15/1943 to 1/15/1944 3.9" 11/15/1906 to 1/15/1907 4.0" 11/15/1905 to 1/15/1906

Pretty convective look to the precip with this northern stream wave. Could see some localized 3-4" amounts in parts of MN/IA, maybe isolated higher? Exciting stuff I know.

pretty good memory

If there's any positive news, it's that most of the early starting seasons in Chicago had at least one decent or good month in Jan, Feb, or Mar, even if the final total ended up being not so good. So we'll see. Notable exception in 1952-53... that whole thing majorly sucked.

What more do you need

Nice top 10. I'd flip the order on some of them if it were me. Would definitely rank #6 and #7 higher. The November 2013 outbreak would be farther down my list if we're strictly talking about impacts in the LOT cwa.

Interestingly it had an uncharacteristically big flip flop out here in the Midwest as well. There were a few runs that were phasing pretty well and had a band of 6-12" in IN. Then yesterday's 12z run suddenly came in with a different evolution and cut totals to 1" or less. Not the Euro's best storm I guess.

Can we get some interesting weather. Please.

I don't put a lot of faith in the regional/smaller scale predictions that say X will happen by a certain year in the Midwest. There's good reason for that... a number of them have busted so far. Another one is that extreme summer temperatures were supposed to increase (say, 100 degree days) but that has not only not happened yet, there's actually been some decrease in the frequency of those days in a number of cities so probably regionally as well. You could certainly argue that farming practices have played a role in that and that we've traded extreme heat days for more high dewpoint days, and the literature does suggest that eventually the "farming signal" will be overcome and that 100 degree days will increase, but just how long will it take? Getting back to snow though. Let's say St. Louis does lose half its snowfall in 30 years. Is there some rule that the decrease has to be uniform farther north? Maybe the north-south gradient just gets more extreme? Chicago's 30 year average is around 36". Why couldn't they drop to 30" instead of down to a a St. Louis-like 18"?

MLI had one of its snowiest seasons ever along with that historic cold, so I can see why cyclone ranks it highly.

Man that is an epic ice storm on the clown range GFS.

I'm not predicting that it will trend favorably. Would I be surprised to see a last minute more favorable trend? Not really. Sometimes you will see a noticeable adjustment in the models after everything gets into the RAOB network and sometimes not. We often get the "when will it be sampled" question and there may be people wondering but not posting about it, so just threw it out there.

Kind of have a feeling that if we get slammed with a big storm, it will kind of sneak up at 3-5 days out and not be one of these fantasy range big dogs.

ORD finished +6.3F, which was the 25th warmest December. 2.0" of snow was well below average, but beavis will be mortified to learn that 21 Decembers have managed to produce even less snow in Chicago.

2019 temperature and precipitation departures

COD appears to be having some y2k y2k20 problems. Nothing showing up as January 1