Henry's Weather

Something something wave spacing something something

These miller Bs tend to trend progressive, don't they?

That's because this system is trash. I'm a biased weenie and I wouldn't give basically anywhere cept DE Maine 4"+ probs.

Not accusing you of this, but every time any meso has dogshit, someone will talk about it "chasing convection". God it pisses me off. Rant over.

We're all biased, but how hard can the fall be when we expect several inches and receive a coating? As opposed to 10-20 and we get half a foot. I don't believe any of us here escape bias. That was my point, and I guess some will react more to the inevitable bust wherever it ends up, but the average weenie cares less about a busted 3-5" forecast than a busted 12-18".

Seriously, the emotions only run high when we expect major totals. I hope no one in SNE is expecting major totals.

Maybe shades of March 2018 with each progressive storm having more cold to work with? I guess this December's period was like that too.

We just seem to have no damn cold air. I'd like to believe the PAC improves but that seems to always be 10 days away.

No plowing necessary

Such a tough forecast

You can see the impact of no deep PAC ridging here. The anomalous arctic rips apart the polar vortex and the cA air becomes cP as it's displaced southeastward, but without a PAC assisting, it just kind of dies on the east shore of Hudson Bay. The GEFS and EPS are in lockstep with this idea. So a great pattern for storms, but not much cold available?

I'd enjoy a nice 2-4 inch event on the backside of an exiting storm. No need to go all or nothing on significant amounts every time it might snow.

I don't trust these 37 at the surface deals. Sucks to be riding the line in January.

I have no expectations. This airmass is complete shit. Any snow is gravy here on the coastal plain.

why 33 to 44th percentile? do mets use 1/9ths instead of deciles? lol

Remember when weak La Nina meant clippers? Exhausting to track coastal after coastal.

16 days out is a long time for small differences to manifest themselves

Long post: It does seem like this blocking pattern isn't perpetually 10 days away on the ensembles, as both the EPS and the GEFS bring out the purple coloring at hr 96. Of course, it isn't immediately in an ideal location. I wonder if there's much precedent for blocks moving north instead of retrograding west as I've often heard about. Looking at both the american and the european suites, it does seem like maybe the path is NW, so some sort of a compromise. To my eye, it looks like this miller B Jan 4th storm bombs out near Newfoundland and sort of runs into those higher heights like a battering ram and pushes it NW? I'm not a scientist, so I don't know much of the physical processes involved. Wisdom says that our best chances occur at the formation and dissolution of these blocks, with the best chance at the dissolution, as some modified cP air has usually been dislodged south at that point, which is what I believe happened with our 12/16-17 storm? So, this wisdom leads me to assign Jan 8-9 and some time mid-late January (maybe the 18th-20th) as the most legitimate threats. I'd be interested to see if this verifies. We also seem to be southern stream dominated at first, with northern stream chances improving if we somehow get some PAC ridging going on mid-month. I think most in NE would agree, with the exception of some far SW Connecticut people, that Manitoba Maulers forced under a block is a much preferable synopsis to a southern stream event. Anyways, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but we haven't had actual sustained -NAO conditions in January for quite some time. According to this table I snipped off of CPC's site, we haven't averaged a neg NAO in Jan since 2010 and 2011, and obviously, we know the history of those winters. Many of us prefer one of those to the other, but the point remains that we haven't seen this kind of stuff in a while. I wonder if we can actually pull it off. edit: I can recall 2016, before the blizzard, having something like -4 SDs AO conditions, so I'd assume there was some extended period of -NAO there as well

Typical caveats apply, but that is a monstrosity of a ridge out in the plains for Jan 8th threat. Shame there seems to be a s/w diving in from Canada that stops a mature evolution from happening on this particular run.

we do indeed

I was poking fun at Ray's definition of major, but what you said makes sense.

eh, is it truly major though?

To get more mesoscale, I just think models struggle to handle period transitions, and since the strong block has been consistent, I'm relatively confident everything else will fall in place with time.

I feel like confidence is reasonably high because we have already had an extended period of blocking this winter

what a massive signal