Layman

Now that this one is in the books, I'm curious what the consensus is for @Damage In Tolland's take on this storm. There were some high fives and "atta boy's" yesterday but was this a case of keen interpretation of model output, wish-casting, persistence forecasting or some combination of all these things? Hindsight is always 20/20 but it's hard telling, for me anyways, if someone has truly sniffed something out ahead of time or just gets lucky. He was definitely onto this and stuck to that going into go-time whereas it seemed like many (who I tended to agree with, especially due to the storm the week prior...) were on the side of this not being too impactful. Just curious what some pertinent bullet points are for an after storm review from those with experience doing this. What was interpreted accurately and what wasn't? What did DIT see ahead of time to say this is actually going to happen? How often do those variables show up and it DOESN'T happen?

That's a great idea and sounds like it would be a valuable tool. You guys should do that here. Maybe us regular folk could get a pool together and bet on our favorite forecasters...? Every 3-4 days a new round gets going and a new pot is available for wagering. Something to think about

Rain really came down for a few minutes here. This was impressive:

Neighbors just got gifted our kids trampoline. Merry Christmas!

It got real quiet here earlier but has noticeably picked up again within the past 15-20 minutes. Took a spin out of my road and had to drive around a few bigger branches. Nothing too crazy or out of the ordinary for this kind of storm but the sound of the winds up high make it seem like it's something different. Power remains on but had a few hard flickers and heard a boom down the road where Eversource reports an outage.

I understand what you're saying but find much irony in these statements. My interpretation of science is different. When the gate comes down and the debate is forced to stop, I certainly question what's going on. Understandably that may not apply 100% here as the focus is on evaluating forecasting technique specifically. If the current state of anything being observed scientifically can't be debated, it would appear to me actual, proper science is simply not being employed.

I might be in the minority on this but I've always understood science to be just that - not "good" or "bad". If you're following the scientific method then the results are simply what they are. To that end, what passes as "science" these days in every realm strikes me as anything but, so that subjective "good" and "bad" is determined by the interpreter of the data and how it fits their personal biases. Actual, unadulterated, unbiased, non-incentivized science should stand on its own. Good luck finding it.

Curious to hear how it goes a few miles closer to the coast. Getting some strong gusts on this side of the bay with a moderate sized pine branch down in the yard. I'm assuming you'll see higher wind gusts in Portsmouth.

Wind is howling, lights are flickering, 1.33” of rain from late yesterday through 7:30am this morning.

How likely is this to push far enough east again so the wind along the immediate coast (NH and ME) is much less than modeled? That last storm was predicting gusts over 50mph IMBY and we literally had none as it rained. Picked up to modest 20mph-ish gusts after the storm moved out but that's any regular day around here.

You can lead the gift horse on a full court press but you can't make him drink the kool-aid.

CJ - is there an official term associated with this? I think over the years I've seen "coastal jack" and "cream jeans" however in todays usage, I'm assuming the former...?

It's times like these I miss the old George and James before him (RIP). While almost always unrealistic, their optimism and exuberance for an unparalleled positive winter outcome was the deep counter balance to the frequent Eeyore posts, even if those are ultimately accurate. Whether it's going "all in!" on a D15 Kuchera snow depth map or declaring a pending "blizzard" with conviction few men can muster, it showed that someone, somewhere (for some odd reason, specifically on or near the Cape...?) had faith that things were going to work out from a winter perspective. Most sensible readers could sift through the posts and take them for what they were, but I for one appreciated the Lloyd Christmas-esque "So you're saying there's a chance?!" they brought to the table.

Has this improved at all over the past week or is everything still in flux? I recall the conversation at the time was that these were all over the place (as you showed here) and the long range was a crap shoot. We're now 3 days out from whatever was being shown at D10 at that time - did the models provide a fair assessment 7 days ago as to what would be happening? From comments over the past couple days it sounds like much is still in a dynamic pattern with no real direction. Curious to see if/when they begin to hone in on possibilities with a higher level of confidence.

My Amazon order for this book got cancelled. No reason given. Not sure what this means for winter...

Seems like the music put him into a trance and he couldn't help it... I was hoping they'd have the actual audio there to see what it sounded like.

That's starting to sound like hyperboreality to me.

Hopefully this doesn't deter you folks from offering up analysis based on what you're seeing in each model gyration. There are plenty of people in here (maybe?) who appreciate the professional perspectives, regardless of the weather outcome.

Looks like we'll be finishing at 2.27" total rainfall here. Breeze picking up a little now.

That's interesting. Is there an amount threshold to determine what's considered "snow" for this? For that matter, is there a generally understood number in the industry that's recognized as a minimum amount of actual snow? I'm not sure if you're comment above implies that to people more in the know than I am with these things. I just know if it's spitting snow here and not coating grass, that's not appreciable snow. (No kidding! )

That's a tough spot to be in and from an end user perspective, I'd much rather be forewarned of a possible event well ahead of time to prepare than have a last minute warning run up the pole. If it doesn't pan out, I certainly find it's helpful to have an explanation why but a lot of people don't care and will likely say "They never get it right!" Trying to predict an ever evolving atmosphere is no easy task and reasonable people understand that. The big takeaway for me whenever this happens is how significantly modeling/forecasting can change in a few short hours. I went to bed last night thinking I'd be woken up with big wind gusts and a likely power outage. Woke up this morning to essentially no wind at all, and still no wind which is fine by me. Determining what drives confidence to lock in a prediction at X hours out from an event is very interesting to me and something I hope to get a better grasp on over time. 12/10 0.71" of rain, max gust of 13.6mph at 11:19pm 12/11 1.44" of rain as of 8:15am, max gust of 11.4mph at 2:34am

0.35" and 56.8 at ~6:30pm. Weather apps are guessing 3.5" total through tomorrow and still saying gusts over 50mph tonight. Basically no wind to speak of at the moment.