psuhoffman

The PBP yesterday when he wasn't doing it in the other thread was an epic disaster

First Last Final preliminary estimated penultimate primary early late call

One other option I wanted to point out. The end of next week the trough has been trending more strung out. If that continues there could be a threat that what was going to be the cutter becomes multiple weaker waves as the front presses and it’s not an impossible adjustment for that to become a threat if that trend continues.

We want the cutter further west. Recent runs are further east which pushed the boundary too Far East behind it and doesn’t leave enough wave spacing. Both options still alive. Also the option for any waves after.

Been in Baltimore at work. But nice big flakes when I left this morning. Happy Birthday.

I think the super bowl Sunday storm was the best example. Perfect track. Marginal airmass but peak climo. I got 6” and 95 got white rain at 35*. We know it’s warmer so it’s not a stretch to say that might have been a 32* 4-6” snowstorm in years past. Subtract 1-2” from all those other marginal events and suddenly it’s a 8” winter instead of a 15-20” one in the same pattern 50 years ago.

So I think you’re both right. We do have bad stretches of this length. But it’s also true we are in the midst of the worst 6 year run in DC history. I think it might be the worst for Baltimore also, just maybe not BWI which got lucky a couple times compared to the city. Unfortunately I think that’s the new normal. If you look at the patterns and random cycles of good and bad stretches they are pretty random but within that random we will naturally hit random stretches of bad years. But those bad years are getting worse. 12” years became 7”. 7” years became 3”. So each bad stretch is likely to be worse than the last. We don’t eek our way to 10-15” in bad pattern years often anymore. We sometimes even struggle to get much in decent patterns (now) anymore. I think we can still have big years. If we get some legit ninos and don’t get any big snows then it’s 4 alarm time! But we haven’t had that. The big storm drought is simple. No legit ninos since 2016. No storms since 2016. But the bad is definitely worse.

They need to stop with op runs post day 5. Don’t get me wrong the Gfs showing a hit 4 out of 7 runs was indicative of its potent and fun. It’s still not far off now. Ggem too. But the range of permutations ops will bounce around within that lead will still have misses pop up a lot even if it’s a good setup. Once within about 120 hours I’d start to worry if ops are misses. That said I love the gefs look. Don’t get me wrong I still want to see blocking. If we could keep this pac and get one more round of -NAO beside mid March…we can dream. But if we’re not gonna get any HL help this is the best look we can have for snow. The gefs snow mean day 6-16 is pretty good also. I see multiple chances. The day 8-9 threat will depend on the play between the southern wave indicated here and the NS. But while it’s similar look at the trough/ridge axis. Much better. Further west allowing ridging along the coast. We need that in a cold progressive pattern. And it’s following an arctic dump so unless we get a phased bomb it’s likely to contain significant frozen precip if the boundary wave can gain latitude. It repeats out to day 16 and looks stable. Results in these temps with this mean precip following the day 6-7 cutter. That’s as good a look as we could hope for without blocking.

You measure side to side right?

This isn’t a typical setup I do good in. Look at comps. Boxing Day nada. Nemo nada. Jan 2015 1.5”. Jan 2017 nada Bomb 2018 nada March 2018 1” not a great track record with off the coast track storms here.

Got some weird 4” max over me

You need to do PBP.

I think it’s supportive of the idea we want. These temps with this precip profile… but besides the fact they’ve sucked the eps also is all over right now. Gone through some radical shifts day 7-10 lately (not even way out in the 10-15 range we know is fantasy) and there is a huge amount of variability in members now. So I’d lean with gefs for now.

half past the intersect of blue and green

I didn't even make the gray

Dygdfttrt hdssryv kfduttedf gfssrgc jggr sswe igddtt doirdfg hdstfrrcv

Cold as bleep though. Has a nice looking pattern at 240 just dumps the whole trough into the east and squashes everything. A bit too much of a good thing. I'll bank on that being overdone.

Wrong storm. There will be a cutter next week. After that is the threat of a wave along the arctic boundary after it sinks south. Gefs can’t agree on which wave but there are a lot of hits day 9-16 between 3 different waves. Same general setup each time.

It’s time

I know you’re kidding but I think they’ve done very well. If you account for known biases and ignore the one or two outliers each suite the consensus has been extremely consistent for days. Imo some just pay too much attention to every run that nudges slightly closer to what they want even if it’s just noise or guidance bouncing around within the typical range of error for a lead time.

With you 100%. We were discussing this in the zoom 2 nights ago then the Gfs popped out exactly the type of result we envisioned. People freaked out when the mini 2 day torch showed up because we couldn’t see past it at first to confirm it was just a temporary reshuffle and not a complete pattern breakdown. But I like this next iteration of the pac driven pattern better. We’ve been stuck on the backside of the trough for weeks and that leaves us in the precarious spot of needing major amplifications to get a storm and without blocking those are thread the needle low odds propositions. The much better way to get snow in a progressive pattern are boundary waves but those won’t work when your in the suppressive NW flow on the backside of a trough. It looks like after the inevitable cutter and reshuffle the next cycle of the pattern puts the mean trough axis just to our west. Add in another arctic cold dump and we are in a good spot for boundary waves. Cycle that look for 1-2 weeks and I’ll take my chances. Not an HECS look but on the other hand the last 10 years it seems like a cow farts and some weak wave spits out an inch of qpf. So these waves can be substantive. Very odd the pac continues to be very un Nina like other than the amplified NS. But the NS has been on roids for like 6 years now so not even sure how much we can attribute that to enso anymore.

-pna

Just popped in to see how the February torch is coming along.

But this is the fallacy that gets us into trouble. There is no continuity between runs. Next run is just as likely to shift the other way. The better argument might be that perhaps the Gfs still struggles with phases involving multiple waves and chases convection or keys the wrong wave. It used to do that. No idea if it still does. Frankly over the last 72 hours I fail to see how anything has changed much. The consensus is still about the same. Some of the players swapped sides or shifted here or there but still looks like the big storm potential is east of the bay on most guidance with maybe some very minor accumulations west of the bay.

I didn't want to post this earlier when there was still a lot of hope and guidance was coming in but some thoughts I've had watching the "tracking" unfold for this event. 1) Know the bias of the guidance for the situation. The euro and NAM have a known bias to over amplify systems and phase too quickly in NS/SS phase situations. So seeing them as the only guidance the last 48 hours that was REALLY good...shouldn't have really excited much. If something is real it should show up on guidance other then the one that ALWAYS shows that because of a bias. 2) Don't fall prey to our own bias to look for positives and dismiss negatives. Example: if the NAM has a great run at 0z, then an awful one at 6z, then at 12z it trends better than 6z but not quite back to 0z...thats not a "good trend". That means the NAM is just bouncing around within a range of options and overall we are no better off then 12 hours ago. Likewise for an entire suite of guidance. If the ICON was the furthest east and shifts west...that isn't a west trend. Its the ICON coming in line with consensus. If the euro was great and has a bad run...then the GFS trends better...we didnt actually gain any ground. Models are just shifting around within their envelope of likely outcomes. In the end of the suite we were still on the NW fringes of all possible outcomes in terms of significant snowfall. We needed the most extreme NW members of all model runs for each suite, including ensembles, to be correct to get a big snowstorm. Just because there would be one or two pieces of guidance that spit out that solution didnt ever make it the likely outcome. 3) There is no guarantee a "trend" will continue. I am NOT going to argue what a trend is. Call it what you want. I don't care. But when someone says "its still a miss but its heading the right way" I cringe inside. No its not. It's not heading anywhere. It's just one simulation based on the current data available. The next run could easily get worse. But if something got better some people seem to set the expectation that it will continue the same "trend" the following run. That sets us up for disappointment. 4) Inside 100 hours HUGE shifts in our favor become a lot less likely. Outside 100 hours we see major synoptic changes all the time. But once inside 100 hours the guidance has been really good, if you ignore a random fluke outliers and focus on the consensus each run, with the general setup. A lot of these situations lately we are taking very unfavorable synoptic setups inside 100 hours and trying to will the storm into what we want. I'm doing it too! But when we get these minor changes in a model that get it closer to a snowstorm for us...the odds are never that those improvements will continue run after run until its a snow for us. Odds are it was just a minor permutation and the next run is just as likely to shift back the other way because there is a reason its still a miss and is a miss on the preponderance of evidence...the synoptic setup likely isn't right in some way. I think the days of us saying "thats right where I want it" once its inside 100 hours are over. You know where I want it at 80 hours now....over us. This willing it north or south or west just fail's 90% of the time. The models have become a lot better. That doesn't mean we dont still see details ironed out. There will be changes to details. And sometimes...there can still be a true bust where some factor is not handled right and a storm shifts...but its going to be the vast minority of the time not the majority. We dont' want a storm 200 miles away in any direction inside 5 days out anymore. Truth is the storms end up pretty close to what the guidance shows once they start to converge on a general idea usually around 100 hours out lately most of the time. 5) big amped up phased storms are a lot of fun to track but not our best bet for snow in a progressive pattern. Boundary waves are the best bet to get snow here without blocking. Unfortunately we are getting a reminder in how frustrating a pacific driven cold pattern without Atlantic blocking can be. Truth is if we want a high probability of a big snowstorm we need BOTH. But we can definitely score waves moving west to east along a boundary in a gradient type pattern without blocking. Just need luck with wave spacing.