psuhoffman

Stop... I can tell what is going on... you are placating yourself with the thought that next year is likely to be a nino and it will finally snow and now Ji is posting evidence that bursts that bubble and you are going to find and cling to anything to protect that bubble...but the truth is there is no guaruntee next year is a nino just because of the string of recent Nina's. Furthermore there is some evidence that the warming pacific might cause increased prevalence of nina. I have no idea on that, I've read it thats all...but if that is true we might have a nina most of the time. And a neutral is even worse. And if a nino is east based with a warm northeast Pac which we have now...those are downright awful also. Frankly...right now simply playing the odds we have a 75% chance that next year will suck also. So stop getting your hopes up then freaking out when they get crushed. Just stop expecting it to snow. Then when it does be happy instead of constantly having to be emotionally crushed when the 25% chance doesn't happen each year.

@Ji You can "take your chances" all you want but ill lay down this marker right now... if we do get enso neutral next winter and the north pacific looks anything close to the hot mess it does there on all 3 of those projections...and the Atlantic also continues to be on fire, which every projection I've seen shows.... next year will suck just as much as this one. This year looked bad but actually had more going for it than next year would if those are the base states. And no, just because it's been bad and we really want it to snow does not mean next year has to be better. Remember last summer I said it looks really bad but still a long ways to go so just hope it changes... that is the same. That last projection is god awful, just hope it changes which it very well could from this range.

Why would you take your chances with enso neutral? They have been our worst enso state the last 30 years.

Again, what is the point? There were warmer climate periods in the past. Maybe we are cycling into another warmer period on a longer time scale. That does not change the fact it is getting warmer right now compared to the periods we are comparing it too which is the more recent past. And so what if it was super warm at some point in time hundreds of years before I was born...is that supposed to make me feel any better about getting less snow now?

People acknowledging ALL evidence and analyzing it is not the end of the world.

By my estimate the eagles are more talented at every position group except 1, qb. So the SB comes down to can PM overcome the significant talent advantage the eagles have everywhere else.

Everyone. The temps aren’t colder. It’s just weaker with the precip. This isn’t a case where a south trend helps places south.

We’re talking such a minor feature here it’s likely for some guidance to be missing something. No way to know which though.

Keep in mind though we’re talking about placing fairly minor banding accurately. If this was a larger system we wouldn’t expect a meso banding feature like this to be accurately depicted. It shouldn’t be shocking if a .5-1” band set up anywhere because we’re talking less than a tenth inch of qpf to make that difference here.

I was curious. I’ve not been watching. Frankly a 1” event doesn’t excite me much but I wish luck to all those who do care! Been doing things with the kids. But just pulled up the last 5 hrrr runs. They’re clearly trending the wrong way.

I looked just not, it got wetter but it’s trending south. 3 runs ago it had the max snow band up near PA now it’s south of DC

No idea but I remember in March 2018 there was an event where northern MD was supposed to get 4-8” the next morning. All 12z and 18z guidance had it. Then around 20z the hrrr started going to crap. Someone said “don’t worry the euro isn’t going to be that wrong 24 hours out, I’ll die on that hill”. Most were ignoring the hrrr Then the 0z NAM came out and shifted everything 100 miles east also. The rest of the 0z followed suit. HRRR sniffed it out between runs. My take is no one hrrr run means much. But it’s troubling if over 3+ consecutive runs it starts trending the wrong way inside 24 hours.

That looks south of previous rap I saw though.

Thanks for bringing this thread back to where the focus should be.

No ensembles aren’t that useful at this range.

It doesn’t which is why I tend not to go back prior to DCA records. But he did so…. If you only start at DCA the trend is still down.

I think you made a mistake. The 1930's was bad by that periods standards...maybe if you are using standard deviation it was the worst. But DC accumulated 182.5" in the 1930 and only 171.9" in the 2010's for instance. The biggest difference was the median though. DC had 5 years with over 20" in the 1930s and the median snowfall was 19" for that decade. DC's median snowfall for the 2010's was only 13".

We’re saved

It is but a couple near normal years surrounded by a lot of awful years makes for an awful stretch. And that 14” normal is already historically low due to the awful snowfall over the last 10-20 years and part of the deteriorating snow climo.

Another way we could simplify our struggles recently would be to break out climo down this way.... If you look at all 100+ years or records until the last 30 years or so la nina's were always pretty bad for snow, and strong east based Nino's were always pretty warm. But we got a lot of snow from both enso neutral and central/west based nino's. That gave us closer to a 50/50 spread of enso states that produced snow and ones that did not. However...recently suddenly enso neutral winters have been awful, even worse than la nina's over the last 30 years. So more recently the reality is we only have one type of one enso state that produces snow reliably. If we get a nina bad. If we get a neutral bad. If we get an east based nino bad. The deck is just very stacked against us now with less base states that have been working recently. I think a discussion we should be having is why have enso neutral winters gone from averaging 24" to 12" in the last 50 years at BWI. That is really the cause of our degraded snow climo. We lost 1/3 of our snow climo because enso neutrals used to be snowy and now they aren't.

There is variance within every pattern. But it is true that on the whole el nino's give us the highest probability of increased snowfall. But if you dig deeper the problem is its really only a specific type of nino, a west or central based one, that causes that anomaly. East based nino's tend to be warm and just as likely to be awful dud years as an enso neutral or la nina year.

His post makes no sense because we don't know yet what kind of nino it may be, if we even get one, and he fails to mention that for the southern mid atlantic (south of 40) a neutral winter is even worse than a nino. However, if you filter nino's simply by where they are centered he has some nugget of truth. Purely east based nino's where 1+2 is significantly warmer than 3-4 are pretty awful on the whole and offer us no improvement over being in a nina or neutral in terms of snow probabilities or temperatures. Basin wide nino's are ok, they tend to be warm but also tend to offer an increased chance of big snowstorms, and west based nino's are the one enso state where we have a very very high probability of cold/snow. But his post doesn't get into all that and taken the way he said it, its misleading.

You're not imagining it. It's been going on for a while now. No its not all the time every pattern every synoptic event. But in addition to there not being as prolific a frozen precip shield associated with mid latitude storms recently I've also noticed that south of 40* there is less ice between the rain/snow, if there is any snow at all that is. It seems like it used to be way more common to have the traditional Snow-sleet-freezing rain-rain transition zones and recently its just rain or wet snow south of 40* and east of the Mississippi unless at elevation.

@BristowWx @WinterWxLuvr but how is this relevant and who is even arguing with these points? Even if we had records that go back 5,000 years it wouldn't really change this discussion at all because our expectations now are determined by this generations frame of reference which is greatly impacted by the generation before (we get a lot of our norming from our parents and elders) but very little as you head further back in time beyond 2-3 generations. This is not just weather, its true of everything. Our expectations in terms of what our life will be like in most ways is based upon the recent past not 500 years ago. Plus if we did have records that went back 5000 years and we knew, oh we had a run of snow this bad a couple times before and this is just a 1 in 700 year snow drought not WORST EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE PLANET (which no one is saying anyways) that doesn't make this current period any less awful, so what is the argument? Second, we do know that there were significantly warmer periods in the past. Judging by what we do know about the climate in Europe and Asia during the medieval warm period its likely this regions went 150-200 years without getting much snow at all. So lets say we are simply heading back into another cycle like that. How is that supposed to make me as a snow lover feel any better? "Oh...its ok that you're not going to get much snow for the rest of your life because it happened 1200 years ago so its normal". Thanks but I don't feel any better about that. Lastly, it's not even relevant to the discussion about our snow climo because when we say our snow climo is degrading it is implied we mean compared to what the normal during our recent frame of reference was. We are not comparing our current period to 800 years ago. We are saying our snow climo is deteriorating compared to what our expectations were calibrated to which was the normal over the most recent climate period. It is very possible we are just in a longer term cycle that operates on a scale (like 1000 years) too large to be captured by our current records. But that doesn't change whether it is getting warmer RIGHT NOW and snowing less RIGHT NOW compared to 30 or 50 years ago which is the discussion being had NOT whether its warmer or snowing less than some random period in history so long ago that no one alive today factors it into their calibration of norms and expectations. I know I am an oddball and sometimes just don't get stuff that others do...this isn't meant to be an attack, I know sometimes my posts come off that way when I don't mean them to be. I just keep seeing these points made and I honestly don't get it.

It was a bad period but not this bad