ORH_wxman

Lol Jeff Smith and I were going nuts over that one. Freshman year at Cornell but we weren’t back from winter break yet…but we were IMing eachother the NGM and ETA outputs the night before. He was down in Plymouth, MA…for a brief moment it was looking like an epic blizzard of the century for immediate coastal MA. The problem back then was the Euro only came out once a day…12z run but not until like 8pm at night, lol. So when you were viewing 00z runs, you always had in the back of your mind, “I wonder if the Euro will say anything remotely similar tomorrow”.

There was a storm I recall that went into the upper 940s in January 2000…wanna say it was 1/21/00….the old NGM model the day before the event backed it close enough that it was giving 4” of QPF to E MA coast and Harvey Leonard started honking. ETA was trending west too but not quite as crazy…but still big QPF. The NGM was usually dry-biased so it was eye-popping to see those numbers. It ended up scooting east and just scraped us with a few inches. I think the storm annihilated Hazey’s area in Nova Scotia. Thankfully the forecasts never got too crazy because I think the 12z models the next day did shift it back east some so it was really just that one 00z run the day before.

Lot of timing differences at that range so it’s fun to keep looking at different panels. Here’s another with two different 930s, lol.

Storms that are 3-4 days apart isn’t that rare. If it’s like 1-2 days apart it’s much harder to do.

Let’s see if we can get a 933 over the benchmark

Yeah it’s 1/6 and then maybe 1/9-1/10 on that big one. Both systems are quite distinct on the ensembles too.

I think Feb 2015 was -13 here. Dec ‘89 was -14 I think. Ironically with all the completely insane warmth, we haven’t had a warm anomaly month beat those. Dec 2015 came close. I think it was +10 or +11. But that’s actually kind of typical of climatology here. The median month tends to be higher than the mean.

I’m guessing about 25-30% of the forum is subconsciously using it as a baseline for expectations.

Oh the whiners will come out at 00z when the OP run shows it out to sea or jackpotting the Cape.

What an absolutely horrific looking pattern over the CONUS. Look at that…looks like late April

Mild February would be right in line with La Nina climo. But as long as the boundary is close to us, we can usually survive with AN temps and still do decent on snow (ala 2017 or even 2008)…or we can hope an SSW happens and we get a big blocking episode in La Niña February ala Feb 2021.

Feb ‘81 is the warmest February on record in a lot of northern New England sites. Absolute furnace of the month after one of the coldest Januarys on record.

Has the 1/6 storm too…you can see a mix of primary lows and secondary lows on the ensembles. That one def looks kind of like a SWFE/redeveloper…I think the higher end coastal potential is def in the timeframe you say…like between 1/8-1/12

We still got hammered pretty good in ORH. Prob was helped a bit by orographics and the strong BL flow but we had about 20 inches in that one. We never truly flipped to IP either…maybe almost a rimey mix of sleet and snow once the dryslot punched in but it wasn’t like further east where it went to pellets and ZR (and straight RA on the coast) before the dryslot. But yeah, it could’ve been 3 feet if it tracked better.

March is the time to go skiing up north. Can’t remember the last time the Xmas to New Years week was clean. Feels like it sucks or has some terrible days almost every year. Even going back to the glory years of winter that holiday week always seems to have problems. Though in your defense, Sugarloaf is often far enough north that even some crappy setups still do well there.

The EPS has the core of the cold anomalies over the TN valley…double digit negative anomalies at 850mb at 300 hours. That’s impressive for an ensemble mean that far out. Decent place for the cold anomalies too. Like @dendrite said, we prob don’t want them over our head in early January. Maybe in late Feb or Mar we do, but not early January if you want snow.

Yeah the frigid pattern actually started in mid-November 1989. There was a very brief interruption from a weak cutter a few days after Tday that year but otherwise it was pure frigid for like 6-7 weeks straight. One of the most vivid memories I have from that December was ice skating at Elm Park in ORH around Dec 10th or so. The ice was so thick already that you had it buckling near shore where the water was only like 6-8 inches deep and it had frozen to the bottom there. You prob couldn’t even ice skate on that pond by mid-January, lol.

Yeah that was to be one of the most extreme dichotomies in back to back winter months we’ve seen. Jan/Feb 1981 might be up there too.

It might work for a place like N ORH county. But you need to rip to allow the latent cooling in the lower 2-3k feet of the atmosphere. It often doesn’t really work out that way when you have no antecedent airmass…but storms like 12/5/20 did.

Look up January 1985…bith the hemispheric pattern and F6 data.

I mean, it’s like 10-11 days out. So yeah.

Euro was still pretty warm. But other guidance has definitely cooled a good bit in the last 24-36 hours.

Yeah that was a legit epic storm for NNE. I’d prob reserve the weenie terms like BECS as storms that are just utterly crushing for a really large area. 1888 comes to mind. Maybe 1978 as well. Feb 2013 was honestly not too far off but I think the forecast was pretty good on that storm and it mostly occurred on a Friday night/early Saturday so the societal impact was not quite as large as some of those others.

I haven’t had one in ORH either. Highest I’ve seen was Dec 1992 in Holden MA where we had 35”. There were legit 36-40” amounts in a narrow band in CT surrounded by a somewhat wider area of 30-36” in Feb 2013. But it’s a mesoscale band kind of similar to what happened in Dec 2020 when some narrow spots saw 36-42”. I think Xmas 2002 west of Albany had a narrow band of 36-42” also.

Yeah still out in clown range but it’s been semi-consistent on ensembles the last 2 days. I’d def classify 1/6-7 at the first widespread “chance”…hopefully it actually becomes a legit threat once we get into the middle of next week.