psuhoffman

I knew your post wasn't really critical, I tried to indicate that in the last part. I am more pessimistic this year though. That is irrespective of my concerns with climate change. Even if this winter was 30 years ago I said back starting in late summer and through fall that just about every indicator I could find that has some correlation IMO with winter was wrong. This was likely to be a bad winter in any era, but add in our recent trends and...well yea I was never optimistic this was going to anything other than what it is turning out to be. I allowed the positive vibes in November and some pretty epic looking long range guidance to influence my final winter snowfall forecast. I still went below normal because I had a feeling I just couldn't shake but I went closer to median v the truly awful results I was kinda fearing. I probably should have stuck to my initial gut feeling. Still time though, and luck can work both ways...all it takes is one really lucky event for the DC area to avoid a horrible fate.

So explain to me what longwave pattern works in that background state, when even in the old “normal” we needed solidly negative anomalies to snow.

I gave up… But seriously the 12z euro had a similar thing. Perfect SW pass, sub 540, all rain from what “should” have been a 1-3” snow. Those things add up and I’m noting them way too frequently. There is always “higher” pressure to our east as a wave approaches. Calling that a high pressure is a stretch and if a very brief 5mph regional south wind (it’s not like it’s a screaming fetch from the gulf) is too much in January with sub 540 thicknesses and a track to our south please explain to me what the right setup is for what used to be a typical small to moderate snow other than the obvious “we need arctic air” which is and always has been an exceptionally rare event. Am I really that “pessimistic” or am I just rational and it simply has been and continues to be “that bad”. Keep in mind in my seasonal forecasts I’ve busted high on snowfall like 70% of the time. Not crazy high usually, maybe only a couple inches, but still I over forecast snow way more then under. Same with my individual storm forecasts. I’ve busted high slightly more than low. So again, am I pessimistic or simply realistic? BTW I know it’s mostly in jest and most aren’t actually mad at me. We joke. And you all know I want snow. I’ll be thrilled if I’m totally wrong and we get dumped with snow the rest of winter. I’ll gladly admit I was wrong and take that L. But I’m not gonna blow smoke if I just don’t see it. I do hope that fact is also appreciated. Either way love you guys and I hope I’m wrong and we turn this around.

Is it good or bad if the discussion is “which is the bigger problem”? Asking for a friend.

I didn’t say it wasn’t worth watching. But the current h5 mean favors an OTS solution imo. Trough/Ridge alignment out west is too far east. And the trough is amplifying at our longitude when we want to see that happen around TN. Remember we need a much earlier and further west development here than NYC. We’ve missed just about every single coastal storm that’s crushed NYC the last 6 years because they’ve tracked to east or developed too late. For DC to get a big snow we need a low that’s already mature tucked in just off VA beach tracking NNE. This (at least on that mean) looks similar to all the recent misses. It’s close enough to watch. But it’s not a great look right there for us.

That indicates fish storm.

@Maestrobjwa no you can’t have that list and no you don’t want it.

I see nothing overly interesting. There are some long shot scenarios I suppose but I feel like they are being elevated in interest simply because it’s all we got. I could see one work out, but if I had to wager I’d bet DC gets to Jan 20 with no measurable snow.

Extreme northeast Carroll, near me, has done significantly better than further south in the area the last 5 years or so 2020

Depends what the expectations are whether it’s worth it. The worst season I’ve had here in 18 years was 14”. Most seasons at least break 20. Median is about 35” and mean is 40. My snow climo is closer to coastal southern New England or NW NJ. That’s enough for some.

Yesterday I noted across guidance there were several mid latitude waves in the next 2 weeks with no appreciable frozen precip associated with them anywhere. Maybe some rain/snow mix on the NW periphery. Another thing logged into the journal. I’ve noted this before a lot lately. It seems we need arctic air to get frozen precip south of 40* lately. Problem is that was always rare. Getting snow at 32* in a blah airmass from a good track was always the more common way we snowed.

My daughters name is Nora Lynn

The pattern continues to look more Nino than Nina. But unfortunately not all ninos are good. Remember we like modoki ninos. Some east based ones can be ok. But the more east centered the Nino the more chance the north pacific low ends up too Far East and floods N America with mild air. Unfortunately that’s the kind of Nino pattern we’re in. The top analogs right now do include 4 ninos. But they are the 4 worst ninos lol. 1983, 1992, 1995 and 1998. 83 was saved by one big storm but was a torch otherwise. The rest were simply torches straight through.

We’ve reached the bargaining stage

Before some jump down my throat I will clearly state again that this is definitely a bad unlucky cyclical period (at least we better pray it is). But I really do believe that. Better times are ahead. The issue is how much better. I’ve seen several troubling things over the last 5 years. Like when a sub 1000mb low took a perfect track in late January without it even being a particularly hostile airmass and produced nothing but 38 degree rain. Or when several high latitude blocks linked with mid latitude ridging. DC getting single digit snow in a season I had 50”. That’s unprecedented. Usually in the past if my area does that well DC is closer to 20”. Struggling to even get below freezing at night for very long stretches. I’ve noted that the southern mid Atlantic has decoupled with locations they used to have more correlation wrt snowfall. The bad years have been awful but years that should have been good weren’t that good. Frankly the last really “snowy” cycle was the early 2000s but it failed to produce the same level of above normal anomalies in DC as further north or higher in elevation except for 2003 and 2010. Each time I say hmm and log them away. The log is getting longer then I am comfortable with. But it will snow again, very likely this season at least some. And eventually we will get another 2003/2010/2014 type season. Don’t take my frustration to mean I don’t think it can snow anymore. But I do think years in between the unicorn snowy seasons are becoming increasingly a struggle.

So we’re posting hour 600 control runs now. Ya….that’s how it’s going.

You don’t get it…or you don’t want to “get it”?

I don’t think they put much effort into those maps once outside the DC metro area and immediate surrounding area. This has been more common than actually getting a “typical” blocking response the last few years. It seems blocking the first half of the season has lost its mid latitude impact recently.

Unfortunately what he did was kinda smart. I think many wanted to be optimistic (myself included) and sided with a forecast of a closer to median snowfall winter. But the analogs and stats said there was pretty close to a 45% chance of a god awful single digits season, 45% of a closer to median bad but not horrible season and like 10% or less of a truly snowy season. So why not do what he did and stick out there. Even if we get closer to the better outcome we’re very likely to end below avg so he won’t bust too bad. And if this goes the way of some of the awful analogs he gets to crow and look like a genius. Smart play.

Our disaster scenario would be if we had a Nino ish pattern earlier (not good because it’s hard to overcome the pac puke you get) and then the SSTs couple mid winter and the typical Nina dreg Feb pattern takes over with a central pac ridge of death pumping a SE ridge to Quebec.

I have no idea. Sometimes the SSTs fail to produce the typical effect on the atmosphere. FailIng to couple is the catch phrase lately I think. Obviously it’s more common when the SST anomalies are less pronounced but other then that it’s difficult to predict.

@Jimade a good point yesterday. The reason the stats are so awful regarding Nina’s that start bad like this is that there are two archetypes of Nina and the colder type typically produced some snow by now. The warmer type tends to be a torch straight through. But this year hasn’t been the warmer type so far we just didn’t get snow. So maybe this is an anomaly that won’t fit the past comps. Also, we’ve been in a Nino type north pac pattern a lot. Quite often the best analogs have been ninos. And ninos do tend to flip mid winter and end snowier. The data is the data but perhaps there are reasons to have hope this year doesn’t fit the typical patterns.

Adding to my last thought, I’d also like to see us snow from a domestic airmass with no epo help. Below is the composite of our 6 biggest snowstorms of the last 50 years. One problem we’ve had repeatedly recently is we only get cold enough to sustain snow with epo help. Some have started to excuse our fails with “of course it failed look at the epo, or no cross polar flow” but that ignores the fact that historically 90% of our snow did not occur in an arctic airmass with cross polar flow. That’s actually not a good longwave pattern to get storms to amplify into the box we want. Fact is a lot of our big snows happened in a look many would say is a “hostile” pacific (look above) because that’s actually the best longwave pattern to get a system to dig and amplify along the east coast. That’s why often a big snow was followed by a big warmup. Cold isn’t sustainable in that look. Conversely a lot of our really long truly cold periods didn’t include a big snowstorm or if they did it came at the end. A very negative epo has 2 problems. If it’s west based anything that amplified will cut. If it’s more east it can overwhelm the CONUS and just squash everything to the south. The TLDR version: we’ve been too quick to just dismiss things with “pac puke” when a lot of our past snow came in a pac puke pattern. It’s just pac puke didn’t used to be sooooo warm that it was automatically a shut the blinds pattern.

@CAPE you mentioned our next modoki Nino will be a good test case indicator. This setup coming up could be also. A western Hudson Bay high used to be a classic way to create a bootleg setup to get a snow absent a good setup with the NAO/AO/EPO/PNA. They weren’t typically huge storms. Temps were always an issue and they are mostly progressive but there were a lot of 4-8” type snows from this kind of setup in the “study” I did of all 4”+ events. A western Husdon high in an otherwise crap longwave pattern was actually the second most likely look to snow up behind the classic +pna -NAO for a long time, 1940 through 90s. Then they kinda went extinct. Over the last 5 years after I did the study I’ve noticed several of these setups and I’ve noted they did often produce a storm that took a good track, but each time it was simply too warm and DC got a 35-40* rainstorm. That is anecdotal though. I didn’t scour through every rainstorm of the 40s to 90s to confirm how common a perfect track rain in this setup was. But what’s not anecdotal is we used to get a snow from this kind of look fairly regularly until recently when suddenly we haven’t. I would feel a lot better if one of these Hudson high setups in an otherwise crap longwave pattern worked out to some degree. Just to prove we can in fact still get snow this way.

It was fairly cold leading into 2016, we had a very minor cold snow a couple days before. But your point is true. DC often has had very warm temps just a couple days either side a significant snow. Upper 50s and 60s for sure. 70s also but they usually were reserved for late Feb and March storms but perhaps that will become more common in January too.