NittanyWx

You'd want that GOA ridge to nudge east a bit more to really dislodge that cement, but if it can hold onto this for a few runs it would at least be a step in the right direction

Neither of those dislodge a decent source airmass into eastern Canada when the Pacific looks like it does. Tuesday a great example..you get a coastal low with no air and no HP. Storms can happen in these patterns, but it's a thread the needle situation and those generally don't work out well for this area.

The problem is the 2 sigma block sitting over the Aleutians instead of the GOA. That's driving the PNA tank. Once again the American suite overamped the VP signal in an area where standing wave/seasonal interference during well developed Nina's occur, got people to bite on it, then backed off on the signal closer in. I've lost count how many times I've seen the American suite do that. If the Pacific isn't gonna help at all its gonna be a struggle.

Right, but it's more obvious when it shows up, but I didn't react until I saw it. What I'm saying is that there should have been people identifying that risk ahead of time, before the rapid warm-up in early November instead of seeing it in Dec and going 'oh crap'.

I think the Australia situation was one where people weren't paying attention or connecting the dots in retrospect. I don't think a lot of people, at least here in the states anyway, look that closely at Australia to see whether the rainy season advancement was delayed or not. Once it was clear that was going to happen and solar radiation was going to be much higher than usual at a time when the IOD was collapsing, in retrospect that was a big flag that we should have seen coming. Even as someone who had a mild winter forecasted, I wasn't nearly warm enough and I think it's because I was too slow to the draw on recognizing that piece and wave train alteration accordingly.

After the record positive Arctic Oscillation print of last week, we now are > +2sigma zonal wind anomaly at 10mb. PV is an absolute beast this year.

500mb model bias has been way too aggressive with heights in the GOA/AK region all season. Happened again.

See this is where I'm disagree. I really am not a fan of using RMM plots when I can observe OLR/VPA data in real time. This was our mid-Jan period. That's about as coherent of a dateline forcing signal as you're gonna get... And we still couldn't find a way to get durable cold out of this. Some will argue that it was a bit more biased to SHem forcing due to some tropical activity, but you still had broad lift in the dateline regions and a ton of subsidence in the Maritime Continent.

Most meteorologists I know did not disregard the MJO. If anything, the pattern did not mimic the expected outcome when it transitioned to the 'colder phases' this year. What does that tell you? If you want to say that maybe the MJO has had more of an IO/warmer phase bias and that bathwater from a slow monsoon advancement north of Australia torpedoed cold chances earlier in winter, that's fine by me. But in a year with very little blocking and a strong ass MJO that was coherent thru the colder phases, we still never got durable cold. When that happens odds are other things going on overwhelmed the typical MJO wave response. And that again brings us back to the PV...

He got dragged pretty badly this month. He had 881 HDD Feb due to something called a Grand Planetary Alignment. That theory isn't going well.

Sure, but you know how the thinking goes: 'This looks like more blocking so it's gonna be cold and snowy'. On the surface temps though, I've definitely found 1 and 2 month lead-time signals that exhibit a good amount of skill, but there are always competing influences. Just stating solar cycles and the QBO weren't 2 of them. Yet, they get a ton of play in the seasonal space in winter. In reality, the QBO is a much better rainfall anomaly predictor in certain on/off equator deep convective regions.

Which is fine and all, but neither the QBO nor solar cycles are able to exhibit a statistically significant correlation to snowfall and 2mt. Which is what makes this whole exercise challenging and makes me really skeptical about how much we can truly use solar cycles for blocking predictability purposes. IOD, I'm sure will shoulder the blame and your point about solar minimum in concert with other things potentially affecting high latitude blocking is well-taken. We absolutely should be looking at other things, and I personally was a 'warm' outlier with my seasonal early this year (obviously not this warm) for a host of other reasons. But one look at stratospheric zonal wind tells me that there's a lot more going on here than people want to believe they understand on the solar/PV modulation piece in isolation. It's part of the grey area of the science, and I think we get fooled by noise a lot in this field.

I'm really having a hard time buying it, but I suppose we'll get another data point next winter. The #1 correlation I see cited by those who believe in solar theory is the NAO correlation, whereby the thought is that the high-latitude blocking over Greenland would be frequent/strong enough to be statistically relevant in peak solar minima years (this year definitely qualifies as a peak minima year). Those who believe the theory often use Monte Carlo simulations or other methodologies to prove it. However, I went back and isolated the past 5 peak solar minima years and found that we had just as many cases that were NAO positive as were negative when we average out NDJFM. My theory is that we've been fooled largely by small sample size, recency bias (08-09) and randomness. Maybe there's an element of climate change in there too, but I'm coming around more to the idea that it was never really that robust a relationship to begin with.

Had blocking that year, which remains the biggest thing lacking in this pattern. I'm still a bit taken aback about just how badly the solar minimum ideas failed this year. Wasn't the biggest believer in them, but this is pretty a spectatular faceplant which I certainly wouldn't have expected.

Just wanted to point out that the models today are setting a new record positive AO when I comb through my dataset. I think this winter has done a phenomenal job of disproving a lot of analysis on the 'solar minimum' and it's perceived correlation to blocking. I had my suspicions before this, but this winter is the final straw for me.

It could correct to a better pattern in the future, but from my point of view, I don't think that week 2/week 3 period qualifies. I'm talking about the pattern and view I have confidence in at the moment, which is for that window. Generally that's what forecasting is. I didn't say "no snow balance of winter", did i?" That said, I still like the pieces on the board for the upcoming weekend and think theres a good chance at a significant storm here.

Synoptically we have some decent pieces in place for next weekend. This is the 'window' that I think makes the most sense for a chance at a more significant system. Behind that, I'm not loving the way the pattern sets up. But these transition periods historically are where I tend to find we get tagged. Something to track this week before it gets boring again.

Finished 3.75" here. Other than north shore LI doing a bit better than expected, generally feel good about how the event unfolded relative to expectations.

I'm close to 3". For the most part the storm behaved as expected. All snow here. Sleet line will come close with this next batch, but all snow up to now.

Yeah, looking likely that will weaken by the time it gets here. We'll get some light to moderate stuff early, then main precip shield in that late afternoon/evening window. SE wind is helping to moisten the column a bit already though, it won't totally fizzle even if best fronto forcing is the west.

I like the call.

SE wind may help moisten things a bit and limit virga. That said, little more of a riming signature on this EC, too. That has been a bit of a trend today, finding a warmer nose in the DGZ, would likely take ratios down a bit. Think I'm gonna stick with what I had earlier, which is mostly a coating-2" city, LI and 2-4" N and W as well as CT. Further up the HV and into northern CT is where you get your 3-6" stuff.

Agree with this

I think I'll nudge areas just north of the city to 2-4", keep coating to 2" for the city, Island and south. You head further up and gain some elevation in and northern CT you'll find those 3-6" type of amounts. Thicknesses will be rising throughout the event and you'll still have low level warmth to deal with after 21-22z or so. I still have a tough time in the city seeing anything more than 2" in a WAA type of scenario like we have here.

I think the northern portions of CT and as you get further north in the Hudson valley can do much better. Decent forcing, less of a sfc issue. Get some elevation and you're probably looking 4-8". I do still think even 20-50 miles north of the city you're gonna accumulate a couple of inches for what it's worth. This is just a pretty tough/marginal situation for anyone in the city, the Island and a chunk of central Jersey.