ORH_wxman

Yep. I posted in the October thread that very warm Sept/Octobers do not scare me at all (if anything they are a good sign for winter)...a torch November would spook me a little but even those aren’t a death knell. We start looking up toward AK once we get into mid-November. We basically just want to avoid a developing death vortex up there. One-eyed pigs are what scares us.

Top 5 warmest Sept/Oct combos for BOS: 2017 1971 2007 1947 1961 Snowfall for those following winters were all above average. Sept/Oct warmth definitely does not scare me. November torches scare me more.

Oct 2017 was even warmer.

The SSTA pattern in the North Atlantic that shows up in 1995 and 2010 is called the North Atlantic tripole. You have warm up near Greenland, cold pool off new foundland and then warm again to the south of there. Its much more distinct in 2010 than 1995 which is kind of cold up near Greenland but there’s a small area of warm water near davis strait.

Wow that is utterly brutal for ORH. Exactly one ensemble member is above average.

Do you have a zoom-in of Ray's graph? His was a forecast, this looks like "Year to date" last winter.

I love how it has 44" for HFD and 39" for ORH.

It’s gotta be pretty close right? Off top of my head this is what I have since Ray joined before ‘06-07 winter: 2006-2007: Kevin 2007-2008: Ray 2008-2009: Ray 2009-2010: Kevin 2010-2011: Ray? (Not 100% sure on this one it was close) 2011-2012: Kevin 2012-2013: Kevin 2013-2014: Ray 2014-2015: Ray 2015-2016: Kevin 2016-2017: Kevin 2017-2018: Ray (you were leading all winter until Ray deformed you in the 3/13 storm) 2018-2019: Ray 2019-2020: Ray (this one may have been really close too but Ray got crushed in the Dec 1-3 storm so I’m guessing he had more?) 2020-2021: Kevin Thats 8-7 and either of you might be ahead because a couple of them were super close that I can’t quite remember who had more.

I honestly haven’t been looking that closely. I will look closer usually later in the month, but I’ve always preached that getting seasonal forecasts right even 60% of the time is extremely difficult. We have a favorable ENSO state so that is going for us...we’re also kind of due for a good pacific. We’ve had kind of crappy PAC the past couple winters and it looks like a weakish QBO going into winter. That at least won’t hinder a poleward AK ridge.

I’d like to see the H5 look on those. None of these are all that accurate from this time range but the 2m temp forecasts are even less accurate than the upper air stuff. Scooter and I still make fun of those seasonal models in autumn 2014 that (correctly) predicted a monster EPO ridge over AK but had like +2 temps from the northern plains to NE. How does the model even reconcile that?

I’d rather not see a torch November because there is a significant correlation to November temps and winter, but it’s certainly not ironclad. There are plenty of exceptions. 2010-2011 is a great example. 2004-2005 is another.

I mean, that really screwed up models last year too. PV was weak almost all winter and LR model guidance was atrocious. The SSW last winter was the Mortal Kombat fatality in February for some of the longer range stuff. It just shows how sensitive guidance can be to some of this stuff.

It only needs to shift a bit southeast for New England to look a lot better. You’d get something like a 2007-2008 pattern or maybe 2016-2017.

Yeah nobody uses sigma so it sounds weird but if the met community started embracing it, then it would eventually sound normal. Problem is the percentage anomalies are just way too popular to abandon even though they aren’t super useful. They don’t tell us much without peaking at the baseline and variance (which standard deviation has covered).

Get the AK ridge more poleward and it fixes a lot of issues. Esp up here.

This is the time of year we all get fired up or depressed over seasonal model outputs. It will all be forgotten in 6 weeks.

Yeah it would be more useful if the community embraced standard devs. Like “this looks like roughly a 1 sigma above normal snowfall winter for BOS to BTV”....one sigma for BOS is prob like 150% of normal while in Stowe it might be 115%.

Only if you go by percentage. Standard deviation takes care of this problem.

The H5 anomaly is pretty hideous.

That is a crazy trough out west next week. Really low snow levels with that thing for October standards.

On a regional scale, this stuff doesn't matter that much. The temporal and spacial variability is going to mostly drown out a climate signal when we're talking monthly departures. You might adjust a forecast to hedge slightly warmer than if there was no underlying climate signal, but it will be dwarfed by the hemispheric pattern. That's why we were able to break the February 1934 monthly cold records at many sites in New England back in 2015 despite 8 decades of warming. Maybe instead of predicting a -3 month based on a 1970s analog, you forecast a -2 month or something like that.

You can see how cold the late 1970s through early 1990s were in autumn on the first freeze/frost data at ORH. Like the 1980s might be the coldest period for autumn on their timeline. That matches some of the discussions we’ve had on here....both anecdotally and other data.

Yes it is. For the airport alone, need to start the year at 1948. Though I'm not sure how different the numbers would be for frost/freeze. The older site radiated much better which probably produced several freezes when the airport wouldn't have gotten them. The older site actually had a slight cold bias vs airport on low temps. The high temp differences were more noticeable though.

We got plenty of hydrology lessons examining the movement of the cups and the runoff onto the carpet.

It drops off very quickly south of Foster RI....the CAD zone really goes from like somewhere between 128/495 in E MA and then into N of RI west of 295 and then down to about Foster and near you. Once you get into like Plainfield or just south of them over to west greenwich RI, it vaporizes. The gradient is prob really noticeable just south of you....SE CT as we all know just cannot hold any cold air at the sfc.