ORH_wxman

0% chance you lose your pack this month where you are.

You can be “safe” and go cold/dry like much of January. Or you can play with fire and reap the rewards (or failure)…but no guts, no glory. This is as good as a pattern as we could ever hope for in a La Niña February.

The funny part about all the pack discourse is it’s prob getting covered again in 48 hours and likely reinforced on Sunday.

3-5 with some IP/ZR has a lot more staying power than C-2…get two of them in a row and then you’re in business for trying to run the table to the end of the month if you can avoid the rogue cutter since there’s prob more threats beyond sunday.

Still looks like 3-4” pike northward but yeah, def skimpier to the south. Euro’s been waffling a decent amount on this one relatively speaking so we’ll see if that is the case again.

Euro and GFS are both pretty similar for SNE. 3-5” on the front end. NAM is staying paltry with the QPF but we’re still about 2-3 cycles away from the NAM being worth looking at.

I had Swiss cheese cover for one day between Jan 11th and the MLK weekend storm…it was that rain on the Saturday that finally punched some holes in the cover. But otherwise it’s been consistent. This past Saturday got a few holes too in the sunny spots. Considering we’ve had like 9-10” total during that stretch, pretty good run to keep cover. Hoping we can actually develop a real pack from this pattern instead of this nickel and dime crap.

I’m not sure if it’s going to be a consistent bias in modeling, but when you have very dense arctic low level airmasses in place, it’s a decent recipe for colder corrections on model guidance. Especially if you have some semblance of high resistance to the north or northeast. If you don’t, then that midlevel warm punch can scream in quickly. (Sometimes it does anyway) But it’s been a few winters since we had a lot of consistent arctic cold anchored over our region prior to storms coming out of the OH valley.

More daytime Thursday. First flakes might be just before sunrise down that way but most of it falls during morning/midday hours from southwest to northeast.

Euro tickled colder again. 3-5” on front end for just about all of SNE save for far SE coastal zones where it’s closer to 2”.

Pretty solid advisory snows on the front end all the way into SW CT. Then a period of IP/ZR before dryslotting. Decent little event if it can break that way.

Useless at this range though. I guess I’ll take it trending colder rather than the other way around but at the 66-72 hour range I’m still mostly just looking at the big boy models.

BOS at -7 that late would be crazy. BOS -7 at anytime of the winter is Uber rare. Even back during day of yore. So yeah..I’ll take the over too, lol. Logan BOS temps colder than -5: 1943: -14 1957: -12 1980: -7 2004: -7 2016: -9 2023: -10

Yes. Stratospheric vortex basically elongated by 120h and fully split by D7…then I posted D10 at the bottom. This might have ramifications for prolonging the blocking into late February and March if we get a full SSW with a clean split

Those were weeklies I posted in January and I’d say they’ve done pretty well. They never fully bought a February torch unless we were talking about some of the progs from maybe prior to January 15th which is getting way out into clown range even for weeklies. Weeklies were def hinting at a coldish gradient pattern which is why I was somewhat optimistic despite February often sucking in La Ninas. Especially once the ensembles were showing the same thing as we got closer. This one looked like it could stay cold enough for a lot of chances. I don’t think the weeklies completely foresaw the huge PV displacement that looks like will occur but they were keeping that PV lurking just N of Hudson Bay

What a crazy arctic configuration by mid month

Euro has been waffling back and forth a bit on this threat. 12z run made the primary more zonked again so not much snow at all for CT/RI…and maybe only a couple of inches this solution for the pike region. But if you back off just slightly on that primary intrusion, then you could easily go 4-8” too. Details to be ironed out.

Classic SWFE baking powder ratios. At least lower levels are nice and cold.

Def a period of IP/ZR but QPF won’t be prolific in this system so we prob don’t need to be worried about power issues, etc. But it will make driving and walking terrible.

There’s like 3 events that are total rip offs from Jan/Feb ‘94. Hopefully we can cash in.

Water content determines durability more than anything else. A smaller impact is internal temperature of the pack and crystal structure but those are overwhelmed by water equivalent. Melting and refreezing doesn’t add water to it. It’s different if you add ZR or rain into the pack and then freeze it. That will add water equivalent.

I’ll be happy if I grab 2” and then some sleet/ice before the dryslot. Most guidance does seem to triple point this over the cape/SE MA or thereabouts which would keep interior cold at the sfc. But this doesn’t look like a big snow producer really anywhere. Even up north it’s prob mostly advisory to perhaps some low end warning in a few spots.

I’d like to see euro go another tick colder, but yeah, we might get a net gain out of this if we can keep that triple point low coherent enough. 06z euro was like 2-3” for the pike region before the flip. Maybe just a smidge less for your area.

Yeah the weekend threat is becoming more and more coherent on model guidance. Looks colder than the mid-week threat but still plenty of ptype issue. Might be a longer period of sleet/ice after an initial thump. But we’ll see how that trends over the next day or two.

2” in Holliston. Looks nice covering the surviving old snow.