ORH_wxman

A Randolph Ripper is what I will use in winter for snow events.

Yeah that was a fun one to draw up. I always say that I need to resume doing those but it’s hard these days with kids, lol. One of these years I definitely will though...unless some other entity beats me to the punch with detail and QC equal to or superior to what I set as my minimum standards. Anyways, here’s the 2007-2008 map again:

Maybe because Europeans don't care about TCs.

That was its "Brady Anderson 1996" season....randomly keeps hitting them out of the park that year and then regresses back to usual after that.

Yes it is....almost no decent Ninas had garbage Decembers. You usually want at least an average December. I'll be ORH-centric since it's easy for me to remember the years.....but garbage Nina Decembers for ORH are: 2011, 1999, 1998, 1988, 1984, 1973, 1955, 1954 I defined garbage as any December that was in the 30th percentile for snowfall or worse. So in this case for ORH, it would be like 7 inches of snow or worse in December. Of the list of years above, only 1955-1956 was good. All others were pretty horrific including the least snowiest season on record in 1954-1955. One other year in 1971 was a little bit outside the threshold at 9.6 inches in December. That Nina ended up being a blockbuster. Though just a few days before December started, the huge Thanksgiving 1971 storm hit, so there's another reason to be skeptical of thinking that year was going to bust. All those years I listed above also had garbage Novembers except 1955 (also the one year that didn't have a garbage winter out of that set....wonder if we should combine the two months when looking at Ninas?)

Common denominator of '95-'96, '05-'06, and '07-'08 were all 3 had very good or excellent Decembers. The pattern differed though in how we achieved it....1995 was a big -NAO block and 2007 was literally the opposite...a monster +NAO vortex that actually was displaced far enough southwest that it was acting almost like a block in and of itself and producing a big gradient in the east where it was a massive torch in the mid-atlantic/southeast and pretty cold in New England. 2005 was mostly PAC-driven western ridging, though the NAO wasn't hostile.

It did...seems like it's going to be operational now on other sites I guess. But it's still the RGEM at 60-84 hours, lol

Nice clipper redeveloper Miller B for 10/5 on the GFS....another 8 weeks later....

Still waiting for the epic pattern that the Euro seasonal had last winter.

Yeah I’m not a total expert on this stuff but from all the stuff I’ve read over the years, you want lots of cold (but not freezing) nights and sunny days. That was happening up until recently when the freezes happened...so perhaps there was enough sugar production to still get lots of reds/oranges from those previous “cold but not freezing” nights and the actual freeze is just going to act to shorten the season rather than have a large effect on dulling the colors.

Yeah maybe the freeze wasn’t bad enough to dull them much. I don’t know. Or maybe it would have been even brighter without the freeze. Hard to say. There’s obviously other factors too. We had a lot of cold crisp “near freeze” nights up north prior to the actual freeze, so perhaps that was enough to really juice the sugars in the hardwoods.

Early hard freezes tend to do both. Dulls the color some and shortens the season. That prob wouldn’t affect powderfreak’s mid-slope pics because they didn’t freeze I don’t think. They would actually get enhanced color because “near-freeze” nights and sunny days bring out more oranges and reds. But lower down it might be more noticeable. Doesn’t mean it cancels the foliage season...just makes it less and shorter than it otherwise would have been.

We’re definitely getting color on the leaves earlier than my previous 3 years here at this house.

I've usually used a longer term average (they have an option for 1951-2010) to compare the years. That idea might need to be reassessed though as we continue to warm....once you warm enough, a solidly below average winter based on 2001-2030 normals might not be below average at all in 1950. Right now, the seasonal variance is still significantly more than the underlying warming trend, but it becomes ever closer as the years go by.

Yeah I wasn’t making a moral stance on it...death sucks no matter what...just throwing out an empirical way of measuring it. If you all of the sudden had, say, 70k less deaths than usual over the next 2 years after a theoretical vaccine next year, then you would be able to more accurately figure out how many were killed who weren’t likely to die very soon. You just subtract that number from the overall death toll. If the virus did not “pull forward” a ton of short terms deaths, and most were medium term on the order of a decade, then you would not see the excess deaths lower much at all.

I think a real measure will be if when this virus passes us, do we see a lower number of excess deaths. That would imply we sped up a bunch of deaths that might have occurred in the next, say, 2-3 years. I’ve seen that theory thrown around too. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to do that unless we have a widespread vaccine.

Yeah let’s keep the politicians out of this thread. We’ve already went down that rabbit hole too far months ago.

I mean technically everything is upstream of eachother since we're going around a spherical object.... But yeah, Tip is parsing the difference between what an index says and the "responsible party" for that pattern. I wasn't doing that....I'm merely stating that often a -NAO will be paired with a +PNA/-EPO type pattern, but when it isn't, it's really helpful to have. I'm not here to dispute that something in the PAC is causing that -NAO to occur....I'm just pointing out how helpful it is to occur during a shitty PAC pattern. I've actually often stated that our best snow patterns are -PNA/-NAO/-EPO....kind of a weird trifecta on first glance, but think of something like Jan 2011 or Feb/Mar 2013. But obviously you can do the big snow thing other ways too....see 2015.

It seems you are implying there is a covariance and correlation between the EPO/NAO...or PNA/NAO or both....which is reasonable. They both exist and we've talked about it over the years. But I think the discussion was more centered around when the EPO/PNA aren't doing us a lot of favors....that's when a -NAO in the means can help out a lot. We're talking when they are "out of phase" with eachother. An anecdotal occurrence off the top of my head was early January 2009....we had a nice vortex sitting over AK (very temporary I'll add), but we developed the best NAO block of the season during that time which prevented us from torching away all our snow and dealing with storms tracking through Marquette. Instead, we stayed more on the seasonable side of temps and dealt with a couple transition snow/ice events. The same assistance occurred to a lesser extent right before the Feb 2013 blizzard.

A -NAO in the means helps keep the cold further southeast than otherwise would happen. I agree with Tip that you want an NAO that fluctuates a lot in it's magnitude to increase storminess, but you still want in negative in the means...or at least neutral. It provides some level of "cushion" when the EPO/PAC side isn't very favorable.

Or just get a black hole so strong and displaced south that we get Dec 2007.....

There also wasn’t a lot of spread because most summer activities aren’t conductive for spreading the virus. Esp when places like bars and restaurants aren’t open or have restrictions. There’s very little spread in outdoor environments.

They can run hot and cold (no pun intended)...sometimes they are nailing it for a couple months in a row but then sometimes they are just clueless. Right now they seem to be clueless. Its also harder in general during the warmer season for models to perform consistently well. Their verification scores are higher in cold season.

Weeklies have been utter trash. They whiffed on the cold in mid September too.

Is that house old enough to have measured snow up to thy knickers in 1717?