ORH_wxman

Ugh....I'll take last year over '11-'12 any day. At least I had snow pack for 27 days in December last year. Jan/Feb was worse than 2012, but I can't ignore the monstrous December difference. I guess if you largely missed the early Dec storm, then I could see how '11-'12 would be preferred.

GFS performs pretty well in fast flow....I remember even in the winter of 2012-2013....January 2013 was screaming fast flow and we kept getting little clipeprs and no big storms, and a huge meltdown and canceled winter posts came pouring in, and then when the Euro showed the Feb 2013 bomb, nobody believed it, but the flow was starting to slow and it nailed it and the GFS was back to being an embarrassment in big storms. This is fast flow, so yeah, toss the Euro far west solutions.

Steadily trending east

Hopefully that's what happens in the winter. I'm a worrier....but it sounds good based on what you say. My worry is that we see this surge early on, but it's a sh*t show with limits, prioitizing pass holders, etc..... and then you have some states still trying to tell people to quarantine....and then word spreads that it's not worth the trip and we see a big dropoff. Esp if the snow kind of sucks.

I'm pretty worried about the day skier volume for the mid-sized and smaller resorts. The big dogs owned by conglomerates will probably be fine, but if day pass sales are wayyyy down this winter, that could finish off some smaller places. I'm going to purposefully try and get to a few this winter for that reason.

Yeah the ncep version looked pretty solid most of the winter. Euro was hideous after a decent December.

It doesn't look very realistic either....esp the ECMWF. It basically has almost no negative 5H anomalies. Scott and I have been wondering this for years....if that is why these models have trouble spitting out spatially representative anomalies. (i.e., we talked about years like 2014 and 2015 where they just refused to spit out downstream cold anomalies despite an EPO ridge from hell over AK/Yukon).

That's pretty hideous....lets hope NCEP is right as that would probably be pretty solid for New England.

Yeah if you have a suppressed Aleutian ridge, then it risks a pig in AK. We narrowly avoided it in 2007-2008, but did not in 2011-2012. '08-'09, and '10-'11 had very poleward Aleutian ridges....so did 2017-2018. 2016-2017 was moderately poleward.

I wish they had H5 instead of SLP, but that is def a -NAO for December....they all have an Aleutian ridge too which is not a surprise in a rapidly strengthening La Nina.

The study I did was based on the Hurrell SLP method (not CPC) and I used DJFM composite. Both methods have their flaws. As for including March in the winter NAO calc, you can make a case either way....but I included it at the time since it's a massive part of our snowfall climo. I know I don't have to tell you how many times a big blocking episode in March produced some whopper months.

2006 was one of the years where the excessive -NAO in October didn't foreshadow a -NAO winter. There's some others too because the "strong October -NAO = winter -NAO" correlation is somewhat weak. It's notable though because it reverses the overall inverse correlation we normally see. I think off the top of my head, some years that had strongly -NAO Octobers that also produced -NAO winters are 1946-1947, 1968-1969, 2002-2003, 2004-2005, 2009-2010 and since the last time I ran the numbers, I think 2012-2013 also may have had an excessively strong October -NAO that foreshadowed winter blocking.

I remember doing a little study on this back on EasternUSwx and found that extremely negative NAOs in October actually tended to favor a -NAO winter. It wasn't a high correlation at all, but it reversed the classic negative correlation. This was only through like 2009 though...not sure what the last decade had produced.

‘07-‘08 was also warm and wet. Not a blowtorch...was around +1ish for the winter.

I don’t think < -2C for a trimonthly is all that realistic. Maybe -1.7ish could happen.

Yeah that’s a decent chance for NNE to get first accumulation on that look. We’ll see if it holds over the next few days. Even if it’s not totally synoptic ala 12z Euro, cold ULL snow showers are a distinct possibility.

Yeah a little tough when you got Madison/Adams towering in your backyard, LOL.

Yeah that’s true. Even in garbage winters you’ll get moose fart upslope events like ‘11-12. We did have a pretty active December down here. 27”+ at ORH for the month...3 events after the big one early month. But Jan/Feb was about as bad as it gets before it actually got somewhat active again 2nd half of March and April. But by then it was a little too late to get really big events.

Last winter was pretty shitty up north wasn’t it?

Jeez that’s not really gonna cut it for a chunk of SNE either. Most years go below zero once you’re just a bit off the water in MA and even a lot of CT/RI.

Pickles would have loved 1973-74....Dec 1973 alone had 5 (!!) cutters with heavy rainfall across a chunk of New England. That is not counting the ice storm on the 16th-17th....if you count that one (since basically east of ORH-CON was rain), then it would be 6 heavy rainers. There were several more scattered throughout the winter....that winter definitely is one of the exceptions to the rule that very high precip = lots of snow. Prob a top 10-15 precip winter but a horror show when it came to snowfall.

1973-1974 kind of shows what happens when a 2007-2008 look 'goes wrong"....everything ended up NW in N VT and upstate NY....even PWM to CON was utter garbage.

Yeah I'm sure there is absolutely a correlation with the dryness. We all know from a thermodynamic standpoint, the air will radiate heat more efficiently when in a dry environment.

1963-1966 were the core of it. 1964-1965 was the peak.