MDScienceTeacher

Which years are your analogs?

I wouldnt give up so fast. The mid atlantic has had several long periods (7-10 years) of significantly below average snow fall. We are probably just going through one of those now. In terms of warming.. I am with @Bob Chill in thinking the net effect is going to be more severe winters storms but who knows. We are just in one of those long droughts.

Right. This is why I have never really understood why someone would trust a 384 hour H5 map any more than they would trust a blizzard being shown during the same time period. I get it, the higher up you go, the longer the wave and the more skillful the long range models get. But 10 days is fantasy land on the surface AND at 500 MBs. when I am looking at the ensembles, I like to look a the individual members to get an idea about how far out in to the long range I can trust the output that the model is producing. At some point what you will see is significant divergence of the members. If you look at the latest GEFS, the point at which the members start to significantly diverge is at about 192 hours. Thats tells me that the upper limit of models range is at about 6-8 days. Anything after that the confidence is pretty low.

Okay dca is within reach. Dulles will be a struggle. My point is that extended periods of low snowfall totals in our region have occurred before. here is 1893 to 1898 (Baltimore) 1893-94 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.2 3.1 1.0 11.7 T 5.0 0.0 0.0 21.0 1894-95 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 T 3.0 5.0 9.3 0.6 0.0 0.0 0.0 17.9 1895-96 0.0 0.0 0.0 T T 0.2 1.0 2.8 13.8 T 0.0 0.0 17.8 1896-97 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 3.0 3.2 4.7 0.7 T 0.0 0.0 0.0 11.6 1897-98 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 T 2.6 5.4 T 2.4 0.1 0.0 0.0 10.5 And there are so many more periods like this.

How much is dca and Dulles at for the year currently? And how does it compare to average? BWI will likely be over climo.

This is really important to understand if you are a snow lover here in the ma. Sure their is warning.. this is an undisputed fact.. but the earth is still plenty cold for snow and I really feel as thought the pendulum will swing back in our direction soon. A lot of climate scientists say that the overall impact of AGW will be more frequent and stronger storms. As long as we don’t go completely off the cliff with the warming I feel like this should be a net positive for our snow chances. We just need to wait for a pattern shift that gets proper arctic air down in to our region. Looking at year to year snow fall amounts for Baltimore, there were many 3-6 year spans with below average snowfall amounts. We are probably just in one of those. Anyway we are gonna score here once or twice more before the end of winter and probably go over for the seasonal average

What does the gfs say?

Right. I have lurked on the board for over ten years now and swear you guys see shifts that never materialize based off of pre-storm paranoia. I can’t tell you how many time I have seen it. It usually happens during the Virga stage. The flagship gfs model gave us an increase in snowfall totals at 18z. Stop looking at the rgem and the hrrr and all the other jv models… they are just gonna make you crazy. Sleep well knowing that tomorrow morning when you wake up it’s gonna be ripping.

What about this: 06Z 00Z

yup.. and it seemed like everyone of those storms trended better for us as we got closer to the onset. A lot of times there was noticeable gulf moisture interaction as the storms tracked in to the midwest.

In 2014 we nickel and dimed our way to 50 inches with these types of storms. Most of them over performed by a lot.. one or two giving us a foot. That winter taught me that you dont need a big wound up coastal to score here. Sometimes you just need pressure/ temp gradient and vigorous ns energy diving out of the plains to get a nice normal snow storm.

I will be in Rehoboth Beach Delaware for this one.. any chance that 0.35 comes in as all snow there?

This storm would be 2-4 inches in 1900 too.

Ugghh.. I thought the comma was all snow..

But the GFS just showed more than the HRRR