ORH_wxman

They have a decent pack up there. Looks like there’s snow on them if you look closely. That pic has a color filter on it that makes everything look darker so the snow doesn’t stick out as much. Either that or the light was really weird near sunset or something.

12/5/20? Sounds like your description. ORH had a 10” paste bomb in that. We had like 3-4” here and further east had like 1-2”.

It doesn’t have to start as rain…and when I say start as rain, I don’t mean for the first 20-40 minutes while the boundary layer evaporationally cools. Yeah technically that counts as “starting as rain”, but it doesn’t really materially affect the storm totals. I mean for like several hours while we wait for heights/midlevel temps to crash. There are several version of this storm where we are already cold enough aloft to snow in the beginning.

Prob how disorganized it is. I don’t necessarily like that either because you won’t get good accumulation with that look. There’s plenty of time to make this more consolidated but I think we’ll want to see this trend better in the next 2-3 cycles to be more confident in anything over high end advisory.

Only for that Feb 7-9 storm. But yeah kind of similar but this is more amped and there is a much more active STJ. But in that 2015 setup you had the western ridge temporarily shoved east into the central CONUS and it torched them but we had this little vortex of lower heights stuck just to our northeast and it was enough to keep us cold and have that overrunning system get us. I remember it was in the 70s down in VA/NC as well as a good chunk of the TN valley and plains during the early part of that multi-day event.

For those wondering why it matters a lot aside from just temps, note how the central ridge is poking well up into Canada near Hudson Bay. At the same time you have a strong PAC STJ undercutting it…if you stick a PV lobe near New England and the STJ is able to fully undercut the ridge…it goes from a ridge to a block over Canada and the colder air gets pinned southeast of it over our area…it almost acts as a defacto west-based NAO block. You start amplifying the STJ into that cold air and you have the recipe for a legit snowstorm. In the image above, the STJ hasn’t yet fully undercut the ridge yet but it’s close. That type of evolution is still not favored and my guess is we end up furnacing for a time, but if you do in fact manage the scenario above, the sensible wx difference is night and day.

@CoastalWx, OP Euro looking a little GFS-ish at the end. Still skeptical of full GFS but that was kind of a big difference.

Yeah euro is a bit south. Still a good amount of spread on this system.

Yeah the 00z run had us matching the EPS more but the 06z and 12z runs trended back to being cold while the rest of the country furnaces. I still think it’s probably wrong, but one thing to keep an eye on is a potential block up near the eastern Beaufort sea to the pole…it’s solidly further east than your normal EPO block but in this case, it acts somewhat similar except instead of the cold dumping into the Canadian prairies and plains, it is further east and comes almost straight down east of Hudson Bay and into Quebec and New England.

Ukie looks pretty similar to GEFS. Maybe a bit south.

Let’s split the difference between that and the GFS.

GGEM looks a lot flatter than GFS through 108h.

00z OP was pretty zonked. Ensmebles were quite a bit south of the OP though.

It might be. We don’t know yet. Further north is favored right now but it could still produce where you are. We wait and see on model trends over the next couple days.

That +PNA/-EPO combo has been absent (outside of very transient periods) since that late Dec ‘17/early Jan ‘18 stretch. It’s what fueled the cold in those 2013-2015 years too. We’ve been cold in -PNA patterns plenty of times in the past but in the past 5-6 years they’ve been more hostile since we haven’t had the type of blocking needed and also the type of -PNA we’ve had is different from those 2007-2011 -PNA patterns. We’ve seen these large phases troughs that go deep into the southwest. They aren’t split flow or the further north like in years such as 2008-09 when we lot of the -PNA troughs were centered over BC and the PAC NW. These more recent winters have seen them dig so far southwest and when they do without split flow, it produces monster ridges in the east.

Aren’t you going up north soon? Why would you want rain up there with a NY state cutter?

Yeah I wouldn’t call that warm…it was near normal on temps, maybe slightly AN. But certainly colder than the other years I listed.

My guess is nobody will be able to forecast cold winters very well even after we get a few…the biggest reason is the AO/NAO has been largely stochastic. Nobody has been able to forecast them with any real skill months ahead. Maybe if there’s a wholesale change in the Pacific that favors +PNA/-EPO ridges like the 2013-2015 years then maybe…

We’ve had some warm and snowy winters recently…2020-21, 2016-17, 2012-13 were all “warm” and snowy around here. They still had long stretches of snow cover though. Ironically, our coldest winter in the past 7 years was a bit BN for snow which was 2018-19.

The reason he got 5-posted was he did this every year even 10 years ago when everyone was getting buried. Calling for the same thing over and over again provided zero value. Even went out of his way this year to confidently call 1/7 a miss. Again…zero value.

I think he’s still below 10”. He’s gonna need several good sized storms…esp if 1/29-30 is a no-go there. Things can happens fast in any favorable pattern but there’s never any guarantees. Sometimes you get 2-3 double digit storms in a 2 week period but other times you might just get one storm or maybe you get two smaller ones or maybe you get skunked despite a good look.

The favored areas are prob pretty similar. This can still keep trending warm too though. But it equally could trend back colder, so we’ll see. But I’d feel pretty good in CNE right now and cautiously optimistic over northern interior SNE.

Looks excellent for CNE and perhaps into interior SNE though more precarious further south.

That’s def a +PNA. Looks where the anomalies are….low anomalies S of the Aleutians and higher anomalies in western Canada. It’s split flow though which is why we see the lower height anomalies in California and the southwest. That can be a great pattern for us if there’s cold around but we’d prob want to sharpen the ridge a little more to lower the heights over the northeast.

The problem is when pack depth is too thin, it’s a lot easier to warm it up, even when it’s a lot of ice. You start getting dark leaves, grass blades, twigs and other things that protrude out of it which really accelerates it. Hopefully we build an actual deep pack for a few weeks at some point, but I’m just hoping for a couple big dogs at this point. This recent stretch has been nice with snow OTG. Today was the first time since 1/14 I hit freezing.