Volcanic Winter

Looks like about 2.4” here and sitting at 60. My tinsel snowman had a rough night

Interesting to me how close in temperature the four major cities are. That’s a pretty minor spread (at least it seems to me).

At the end of the day, at least we have memes and the friends we’ve weenied along the way.

It’s disconcerting, 100%.

TBF people light Snowman up with weenie’s constantly too, many cases for posting his genuine thoughts. But because it’s ‘negative’ it gets seen as trolling. I don’t think that’s fair, personally. Look how you say things matters still in written format, and sometimes people come off a certain way when they post that goes beyond giving objective opinions / forecasts. But I do think some have been largely doing better with that. I will always give props to well reasoned posts, especially those with effort behind them / data etc. And that holds even if it’s not what I, personally as a ride or die cold & snow weenie, want to hear. I try to separate emotion from this, because I’m here to learn first and foremost. All just my thoughts / weighing in. I’m not the arbiter of what’s right and wrong for the forum.

Beautiful shot! And a nice event, that one had a sharp cutoff just to my south where I only saw virga due to the very dry air on the north fringe, but it plastered ACY IIRC. I did better in the following event and then at the end of the month for my main snow that month. But 8 inches is a very nice event in an otherwise poor stretch. Really pulling for the megalopolis to have a good winter this year.

Can you help me understand the “standing wave” in the context of the MJO? Does that simply mean a slowdown with forcing lingering in a specific phase from some sort of feedback loop?

How are you feeling about your megalopolis snow forecast at this point? Zero implication in me asking, I’m merely curious. If you could tweak any of the ranges, what adjustments would you make? Or would you stay locked in with the original forecast? Thanks Ray.

I find it interesting, but I’m weird.

Final cooldown before the parakeets fly in.

I’m at 29 here currently, northern border of the NJ pine barrens down in Ocean Co.

I was 22.3 on 11/25 which is also marginally my coldest temp so far this season. 22.5 this AM, coldest of the month.

Mirage? (kidding)

Starting to look at the models more now, this is around the time my watch begins. Though as mentioned my emotional investment for the time being is staying low. I do like the continued activity though, I think that’s a good sign. Lots of juiced systems, I would think it’d be hard not to luck into something eventually even lacking a wholesale major pattern improvement. Obviously we need a better temp profile and at least some improvements, but I think that will happen in Jan even if only marginally enough to get us a trackable event. Certainly not disheartened, we’ll get there one way or another.

I always liked ‘infernal hellscape,’ but then I remembered that’s my nickname for Florida.

Simply unfathomable. I appreciate this post very much Bluewave, I have an intense fascination with the LIA both from a volcanism perspective and just the general extreme climo differences to now. I was born simply too late to experience the milder facsimiles of the harshest LIA winter months in the 70’s and 80’s. — I generally believe the LIA was caused by a multitude of factors instead of any one singular thing, but I found a snippet of a paper suggesting volcanism as the principal driver, kicked off the by the enormous Samalas / Rinjani eruption of the 13th century (larger than Tambora, even greater climate impact). https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AGUFMPP43D..05Z/abstract Seems to suggest the ability for the large scale volcanism of the LIA to tip a susceptible AMO into a prolonged cold configuration. It’s interesting because traditionally ‘volcanic winters’ are short lived phenomena.

I’m pretty confident that we’ll be surprised one or two more times this season, at least. Whether that works in our favor or against us is yet to be determined. Referring to the models undercooking the magnitude of an upcoming pattern feature, hopefully that ends up being blocking this time while we have at least a marginally improved Pac. For now, just a hope.

How are the current odds for a SSW into Jan? I’m not doing the “welp better hope for a SSW” meme and would be fine with a continued, weakened PV rolling forward. But the prospect of a SSW somewhat early this season is definitely interesting and makes sense with the -QBO / solar (thanks @40/70 Benchmarkand others who have helped me learn more about these interactions). Just curious, and not suggesting it’s ultimately necessary or anything.

If things stay this active, we’ll have opportunities. That’s really all I can ask for. I agree Jan will see improvement, hopefully with blocking returning and cooler air coming back to the continent. Think it’s difficult to get a real handle with how much the models have been swinging around (again), but we’re talking long range still anyway so that’s not entirely unexpected. Keeping my investment overall minimal until we get some signs of life, and just trying to focus on enjoying the holiday period. Always my favorite time of year! Still prefer it with a shot of vodka cold instead of Bacardi cold, but what can you do? Pretty morning in Hillside, caught a nice glimpse of the city on my way in. Feels warm in the sun already!

Same. I shot up to 38 late last night, but then managed down to 28 this morning. Seemed sort of odd. Took a lot longer to start crashing than prior ‘cold’ days. My low for the month is 22.

Think this is a good post from @psuhoffman

Holiday spirit was vibing this morning, it was nice. Let’s not lose it yeah?

You could say it’s the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum… (Sorry, traveled far for that terrible joke, I’ll show myself out)