ORH_wxman

Models haven't gotten worse. We just track stuff much further out than we used to. 144 hours used to be utter clown range but now it’s prob akin to like 108-120 from a decade or 15 years ago. And like 96 hours a couple decade ls ago. There’s a lot of threats back then that didn’t even appear until inside 6 days. The Feb 2013 blizzard didn’t show up until about 132-138 hours on the euro (and it was completely by itself for a few runs too)….Feb 2006 didn’t show up until about 108 hours out. A lot of our SWFEs back in the late 2000s/early 2010s didn’t stop trending hard untie inside 36 hours. Also we had far fewer model runs back then so less data to parse creating a veneer of stability.

06z euro was prob 1-2”…esp 495 NW

It would keep trending little by little each run until it was a 12-18” job eastern areas and 6-12 west

At least the skynets are pretty interested this time. They had no interest in the 1/15 threat.

Yeah I was hoping winter storm watches would be posted tonight.

Yep. Almost had 10” in Jan 7, 2024 but fell just shy. Ditto Feb 25, 2022

We might as well get a HECS to break the streak. Last time I went this long without a double digit event, the streak was broken by December ‘92 storm.

Could easily have that 1/24-25 system cut. Depends how much phasing you get. Keeping the shortwave kind of separated from the main PV as long as possible is essential to getting a huge overrunning storm like we see in the 18z run….check out the 12z run if you want to see how it cuts.

Scooter high special

18z GFS trying to make this interesting on 1/18-19....not gonna quite get there but that was a pretty good sharpening of the trough compared to previous runs.

Yeah that was a pretty decent trend toward those GEFS members on the icon. Want to see euro get more enthused though.

Not to mention we’ve had several systems that were initially amped get crunched SE and whiffs or something less impressive…even including the “cutter” this past weekend which ended up a sheared out piece of trash with lots of CAD.

We definitely believe you. Just add in a few more smiley faces to really convince the rest.

Hopefully it looks more like this than a cutter

Oh it’s there. Might get interrupted briefly by a nice cutter but it’s there. We’ll finish January BN on temps unless there is a huge shift in guidance post-weekend.

OP euro is trying for 1/19-20. Actually hits CNE/Maine pretty good. Gets MA with light snows. A little late developing.

Going bye-bye with the big WPO shift again. We warmed up due to the AK/Bering vortex…but back to the heavy -WPO after this week.

Yeah which is why I’m looking forward to the gradient pattern at this point. We might get a cutter but at least there will be QPF events to track in that type of pattern.

Meridional flow definitely overcomes a lot of imperfections.

The funny part is it never corrects itself. I’ve seen countless threats that had interference but it was overcome either due to vort strength or one of the shortwaves changed slightly. But we’ve never trended away from it recently.

I’ll give 1/18-19 another day or so to trend better but otherwise yeah, we wait until post-1/20

Unlikely we get anything of note. I’ll still hold out a little hope for 1/18-1/19 but we need some good trends on that over the next day or two.

What the most interesting out of the entire synoptic landscape over the next 7-9 days is that we see this mean trough in an almost ideal spot over the eastern third of the CONUS with multiple shortwaves that dive into that mean trough and we fail to get a single decent QPF event out of it. It’s almost the anti-2015….surgical precision of somehow not producing.

Give it a couple weeks. We’ll get the inevitable Biloxi, MS blizzard warning while we have a thread for -15F low temps.

Last year was sneaky cold too (compared to recent winters anyway), though not nearly as cold as this one has been. Both winters have featured a dearth of big systems. It’s just been a lot of dryness.