psuhoffman

@Ralph Wiggum I agree with @Bob Chill. Are there ways to score in that look ya. But we’ve seen this pattern plenty the last 7 years and has that been working out for us lately…(checks data) umm. We would need timing and we’d be rooting for weak waves which given the circumstances seems blah @WxUSAF let me admit my expectations given my location probably make me even more disillusioned than most. In what was the absolute worst winter ever up here 2020 when DC had no snow I had 14” here by now! We’re about half way through and I need 17” just to avoid the worst season ever! And simply not being the worst ever isn’t my bar or target even in a bad year. And that’s not unrealistic when 95% of winters here, even the awful ones, at least get to 20”. So the prospects of licking into some 5” messy event does absolutely nothing. If I finish the season with 10” it’s by a huge margin the worst winter ever up here. So seeing a “well that not gonna be good but maybe we luck into one minor wave eventually in that” doesn’t do much for my feelings on this winter. I have a lot further to go here ironically. DC can get a 6” storm and suddenly this year catapults way up the list to a bottom 30% but not bottom 1% winter. Here i need 17” just to not be the worst! Lol That said if I do get one snow I’ll enjoy it in the moment but I separate those 2 things. When long range pattern hunting I’m a big game Hunter. What’s the point of over analyzing some low probability pattern that would require a ton of luck to work when none of that will be evident until close range anyways. If something pops up day 3 with a legit chance in a flawed pattern ya I’ll be in on it and excited. Just can’t bring myself to get excited about a huge -pna se ridge long range looK with “but if 20 details all go our way we could get some front end mix” kinda thing.

What if…we get a 2003/2010 type Nino and DC gets 8” next year. Then do I have permission to start sacrificing people who try to say “but it’s this or it’s that”? Lol

look at the ridge axis along the west coast then look at the extent the trough is stretching to avoid progressing east. That was what I meant the other night when I said this isn’t the pacific. Even when the pac is perfect there seems to be resistance in the flow to getting a trough into the east for any meaningful length of time. Something else other then just the pac is feeding it. And this is why a big -epo arctic flow pattern isn’t actually correlated to snow here. This is actually the way more common outcome from an epo ridge. A -epo +pna is a rare combo. It’s difficult to get that longwave configuration. A -epo usually dumps the cold west of us and pumps a SE ridge. That’s why a way better pattern for snow here has always been ridging across central Canada and the NAO domain. But that combo usually comes with a +epo and it’s not a really cold look which is why the vast majority of our snow, even if you go back to the 1800s when we got a lot more, has always come with temps near or even above freezing! Arctic cross polar flow patterns are 1) rare and 2) not even usually a good longwave look to get an amplified storm off the east coast.

EPS fully caved to the gefs. Dumps the trough into the west and pumps the SE ridge. But we already knew. Frankly, it could have been the CRAS, as soon as anything showed that didn’t we all go “yup that’s exactly what’s going to happen”.

Nothing anyone has said on here had ever offended me. It’s just discussion and debate. Not personal. None of your points was wrong. I just felt there has to be more to it since none of those factors explains it all and it’s unlikely to get so many things to combine randomly.

Great 2 more mins a day everyone can clearly see my ugly mug.

@JiExplain this one to me. Flow is off the North Pole. And I’m not cherry picking if you look at the run the pac pukes been cut off for a week at this point. It’s a CP airmass. 50/50 feature as storm approaches. The flow is so good the storm gets too suppressed. And… Its just a rainstorm. No frozen even on the NW fringe in the coldest snowiest part of winter with a CP airmass and a suppressed track. Lately I don’t even know what we’re supposed to be looking for anymore!

I don’t care about the climate change angle. I mean I care but not in the framework of on this forum. Nothing we say here is going to do a damn thing one way or the other. What I find annoying are those that want to get bent when presented with simple facts and data because it might not agree with a preferred reality. I don’t care if that reality is because of politics or an emotional attachment to frozen water vapor! And the data doesn’t even have to mean the trend will continue forever. Maybe the 2% are right and this warming is just cyclical and 50 years from now it gets colder and snowier again. But why does that even matter? I don’t care what happens 50 years from now. I’ll be long gone. I’m using data to say how our climo has changed from some x period 25/50/100 years ago to right now for predictive purposes NOW! That’s important because a lot our analysis is based on the concept of expectations based on these historical norms. That’s pertinent to a pattern analysis discussion. Why is that even controversial? We all know why, but I’m not playing that game. I’m just using data to show how probabilities have changed to be useful in a predictive way. Because of extreme variance which is increasing locally our snow data can be presented in ways that cover up the underlying trends. But the most significant factor to me, as stated above, is that the “most likely amount of snow X in a given season Y” is declining significantly. Yes we do still and will still get big huge snowy seasons once in a long while. But what is the most likely outcome in all the other years is getting worse, and pretty significantly so! To me anyways what happens in 85% of the time matters more than what happens the 15% of years like 96/03/10/15….

Ya now do median and individual seasonal probabilities. That chart is proof of “you can make numbers say anything you want”. Presenting the data in that format hides 3 facts. 1) Within the variance is a long term decline. 2) the seasonal variance is increasing. 3) the odds of seeing a specific amount of snow, X, in a specific season is decreasing. Those are facts but this is my spin/preference. Number 3 is the most significant. The “what is the most likely amount of snow in any given season” value “x” is declining significantly. While it’s cute that once in a blue moon we can get a hecs or a 50” season the vast majority of our lives are spent not in one of those years. It matters way more to my satisfaction what happens the other 80-90% of the time! And that’s where the decline is greatest. If you remove all seasons that are an anomaly (more than a standard deviation) the decline becomes crystal clear! We’ve always had big years and bad and variance. But the variance has shifted to where what is most likely to happen in any given year is radically lower. I ran the numbers a couple years ago (so it’s only gotten worse) and at BWI the “what is the most likely value X in a season” had declined from 21 to 14. That matters to me way more than the fact every 8 years or so we get some 60” snowmageddon. Those don’t happen often enough to offset the losses in the rest of the years Imo.

Lol no one has harassed anyone. No one has said it will never snow again. But I’ve seen simple data and facts about what has been happening. And I’ve seen people who can draw their own conclusions then feel harassed by it when it’s not the picture they want.

The euro still ends up nothing but rainstorms, it just mocks us by doing it with a perfect pattern.

@Jithis is more depressing than the Gfs. Look at that setup. Tight wave spacing. System still over New England as the next wave entrees the Midwest. All that ridging over the top. Ridge pressing into the west. And it’s not enough. Not even that close. Ends up a New England event.

A SSWE early Feb in 2018 is speculated to have caused what happened that March/April. It's plausible an event in late January could start to impact by the second half of Feb. But we've seen the SE ridge win in every other scenario so why are we confident the results would benefit us? It could just dump arctic air into the west again and pump the SE ridge to the north pole.

I'm sorry that sucks. I had to cancel a trip to snowshoe last winter when the kids got sick. If the long range guidance is correct Feb could get really ugly... if so my full attention will turn to my PD trip out west shortly lol. Another option is Vermont. Killington is really awesome for the kids. They have a really good kids program, and the back side of the mountain isn't very crowded and has very easy green trails all the way down to the base. It's really not THAT much further than snowshoe and doable if you take a day off and make it a 3 day weekend. Even if we torch odds are Vermont will find its way to a snowstorm or two sometime in February, I would imagine...god I hope so or they are FOOKED because they have absolutely no base right now and ski season is kinda half their economy. Even past torch years like 98 were NOTHING like this. I went up to Vermont a couple times that winter and they actually did ok because enough of those rain storms were wet snow up there and they had a pretty good base. I can't remember a year where mid January the ski resorts up there had absolutely no natural snow base at all.

The GEFS flips the pattern in the Pacific exactly opposite...totally reverses all the blues and reds...and the result is exactly the same for us.

https://www.snowshoemtn.com/media-room/skidder-slope-live-cam Heading up tomorrow. Will be in the pool/hot tub tomorrow afternoon and on the slopes with my kids Sunday and Monday. There are ways to survive this with your sanity intact.

Well we are about to go from "its warm everywhere" to "its just warm HERE". Baby steps and all that jazz.

I am almost positive Ji was just trying to be funny. But if he was actually being mean spirited, highly doubt it, then the way you responded wouldn't exactly have been the most effective way to deal with it anyways.

It was a joke...

it looks great for Winter Park where I will be PD weekend...Ya'll should come along.

It would be cool and interesting to have the data and it might be enlightening to find previous periods similar to this one so we have better comps to use. But it wouldn't be that relevant to what we are doing here because when we analyze the weather history is a huge deal. When the very knowledgeable posters here break down these day 10 looks in here to analyze our snow chances that analysis is based on what we know historically is a good pattern for snow and what the cause effect relationships are that work out in our favor. We aren't basing our expectations and discussion on some other climatological period in the 1600's. Now maybe having more data would show another cycle like this...and a long frame of reference would show us some data useful to this current period...but my guess is that is so long ago no ones expectations are going to be based on something that happened before their great great great grandparents were born. What happened in our lifetimes or in the more recent past is always going to skew perceptions so we would probably still be lamenting "things are bad" compared to our recent framework.

But the issue is there is way too much crossover between the pattern and the fact it’s warming to avoid some bleed over. Because a lot of the analysis we do in winter is centered on “is it gonna snow” and the analysts we do of the long range pattern is grounded in historical precedence and expected outcomes, it’s relevant and stupid to just ignore it. The issue seems to be that when it comes up in relation to the pattern the simple mention of it upsets some. Some for emotional reasons some for political maybe I dunno, but that then starts a side debate about it and then veers off on a tangent and I get the result isn’t good. Take today. I didn’t talk about climate change at all. I simply refuted some claims that “this is just a normal cyclical thing” by showing the data that this is the least snowy period ever. That’s it. Then I addressed some individual “causes” you brought up one by one and said there is more to this than to just keep cycling between different variables as a cause but I didn’t say the elephant in the room. But we have to discuss what’s impacting the pattern right? But that started 20 posts on climate change again because everyone knows what’s really going on. I do understand I just think it’s kinda silly and a lost cause.

I am a very analytical person, I enjoy a debate, and I like science. This hobby isn't making me miserable. I still enjoy the discussion and debate around the science. Yes I love snow. Yes I want it to snow more. Its annoying me that its not snowing but that is not making me miserable. I am about to go to lunch and I will be enjoying it. Later today I will pick up my children and I will be very happy to give them a hug. We will enjoy dinner. This weekend we are going to snowshoe and will have a wonderful time. The fact it didn't snow is not going to ruin my day or my life. On a list of things I am more upset about or concerned with...whether Jalen Hurts shoulder will be healthy enough by next weekend is higher on the list than if it will snow. I can go see snow whenever I want somewhere...I can't go see an Eagles super bowl anytime I want. My failed marriage was something worth being upset over... snow is insignificant compared to REAL problems. This hobby is an escape from real problems. I like to analyze. I like to debate. I actually enjoy this. Yea I would enjoy it MORE if it was snowing but I would enjoy it less if it wasn't AND I wasn't analyzing the weather. Not right now...not until the kids are older. But the next 18 year period starting in 5 years....by the time we get that far into THAT period I likely won't be here anymore. I do plan to move somewhere closer to skiing and more snow once the kids are older.

Its my fault. I saw a bunch of "its not really that bad" posts and simply wanted to show "it is that bad, worse ever actually" and that sparked another climate debate which isn't really what I wanted to do. We've had that several times already recently. But the problem is there really isn't much else to discuss either so these tangents take over. One decent long range GFS op run isn't really worth that much discussion either.

I started the current period because NWS starts climo periods after the turn of a decade. So eventually our climo will start with 2011. It wasn't meant to skew the data. I used 18 instead of 30 because I wanted to put it in a reference we can understand...but 18 is the shortest period you can use and still claim much statistical significance. But it doesn't change the equation as much as you would think for 2 reasons. First going with 7 years before the bad stretch also brings a historically snowy season into the period of record for the previous "least snowy" period on record also. Not quite as snowy as 2010 but close enough that it mutes the impact of changing the years. Second, it does change the equation with the mean some but it doesn't impact the median or probabilities of snowfall season to season much at all. And that has been my point all along...our mean is skewed by a couple good seasons a decade but the REAL story is how much worse the typical seasons in between those rare unicorn snowy years are becoming. Since we spend 80% of our lives in those years...what its like in those years is actually more important IMO to our sanity that the fact it snows a shit ton (its a technical term) in years like 2003 and 2010 and 2014. It's all arbitrary where you start and end a period. If we start a period with the snowiest year on record that kinda skews things the other way...and the fact that starting the current "18 year period" with the snowiest year ever still doesn't make this period look that good is indicative of how bad its been.