psuhoffman

You mean he might get one of his long range forecasts correct for the first time in like 9 years! BTW, calling for a warm Feb in a cold enso year is not exactly going out on a limb.

EPS is tanking the EPO and the AO is heading towards negative again by day 15. This is the inception of the flip back to cold. It looks like things are reloading again by Mid Feb.

Maybe but you can't chase what's already done. We failed in that nino. We waited years for a nino and it failed. Sucks...but this is not a nino so if they are chasing the lost opportunity for a big huge snow season by applying that standard to this season its a huge mistake...the bar for a W this year was just "please don't totally suck" and we've achieved that!

The monthly guidance is god awful at projecting the MJO, which is not shocking considering by day 15 the ensembles aren't all that great either frankly...but projecting the MJO out to like day 15 using more reliable guidance gets it near 6/7 at that point which is logically a week away from 8. The montly guidance stalls the wave to an unrealistic level given its behaviors this year. I would disregard which is also why I disregard the monthly guidance in general.

No and that is why the ensembles look exactly like that day 16 BUT its only a week away from getting to 8 which is ahead of schedule. If things flip back by Feb 20 we are ahead of the game.

Did you look at that 0z solution...like really look at how that played out? There were 3 NS Sw's involved...all of them had to be exactly where they were to make that work...and the initial STJ wave was rain, but then left enough energy behind that phased with another NS SW timed perfectly behind the cold push from the initial wave and...I mean come on forget thinking you would get anything like that 2 runs in a row from this range. I would be nervous believing something as convoluted as that nonsense even if it was 72 hours out not 200! The reason for the difference, other than just chaos, is one of those 3 NS waves ended up getting absorbed into the AK Vortex and never makes it into the equation this run. Look at hour 174 and compare to 0z...the NS system just north of MN is gone and that sets of a chain reaction that leads to a different solution...the runs are actually impressively similar up until that point.

Think of it this way... flip the situation...imagine if we were all warministas waiting all winter to get a nice MJO into the warm phases...we would be kinda pissed right now that after a slow amplified cold phase tour...its racing weakly through the warm phases and already headed back towards cold by the second week of Feb with hints the warm up might not last that long. This is the total opposite of how this went most of the last 8 years.

The consensus now has the MJO already getting into 7 by the second week of February! Nice to see it slow and amplify in the cold phases then weakly race through the warm phases back towards cold again. Seasonal trends...

I finally had a chance to look over the longer range guidance...and I am already seeing the seeds of the late Feb flip back colder by the end of the ensembles. I don't think we are entering into a prolonged no hope period...by the time we are firmly into the warm up we may be tracking the flip back.

@mitchnick also...just looked at the long range GFS... that is an incredibly weird look, and for a few days would be really bad for us...not that I would mind a few days in the 50's or even 60s at this point! but it would likely be temporary and I would roll the dice with where the GFS has things day 15! It's incredibly blocky up top, the AO looks negative and with the potential to flip very negative fast...its just that WPO ridge went so poleward it cut off and became a block with a vortex over AK and at that moment thats super bad...but as soon as that moves anywhere else things could flip cold again right quick given the overall hemisphere longwave pattern. I LOVE the way the central pacific looks... that GFS look would imply we might flip back cold even faster than I anticipated. I'm not too mad at it.

Maybe but it was just yesterday the GFS had a snowstorm. At that range I'd wait at least 2 days to establish its a real trend and not noise. It's definitely troubling but I'd give it one more day before hitting the red button and moving on to tracking hints at the flip back in late Feb.

I am amazed that over several of the last few years...when we were stuck in absolutely hopeless winter base states with a status quo where I would take one glance at the mean longwave pattern and say "move on this is absolute shite shut the blinds no hope hell" and people would come at me with "you're too negative, stop being a deb, there is always hope" and of course there was not and we got no snow. And now this year...we are having a pretty good season, its been a real winter, with several legit snow threats and at least one hit for most of the area and analogs say even if we strike out the next week we probably get another good patter from about Feb 20-March 20th and one last chance....and now everyone that was calling me a deb for years has decided to go full deb mode themselves. It makes no sense.. It's almost as if they would rather be pessimistic when there is actually a chance...and optimistic when there is no hope at all.

I was adding some dramatics for effect in my post but...for me March has been my snowiest month over the last 10 years by far so.... and for many in this forum it's been pretty good. 2009, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022 all delivered significant snowfall to at least a portion (I don't just mean me on the fringe northern border) of this forum. As for your climo, I can't say for sure, but remember years back we took a look at coop data near you and established that your snowfall seems to be consistently lower than very close geographically stations. My theory...it has to do with where you are in relation to water, you're surrounded on 3 sides by water and you are at near sea level southeast of the fall line...warmth floods north along the bay and up the Delmarva and you have absolutely nothing to stop it. You also downslope off the hills to your northwest. The same type snowfall gradient happens further south near the Bay but because you have this big body of water separating the communities it doesn't seem as drastic, but snowfall is significantly lower east of the bay then west and that phenomenon kills you because even though the Bay ends just southwest of you, the same impact gets to you as the warmth comes up the bay then continues northeast with nothing to stop it from getting to you. That's my theory, but no matter what the cause, the fact is snowfall data shows you live in a regional snowfall minimum. A snow anus so to speak. Dundalk near Baltimore has a similar phenomenon. The people that live there know they will get less snow than anyone else in the Baltimore area 9/10 times. It's just how it is. You won't change it by complaining about it...you could move 20 miles away and have a significantly better snow climo though if that matters to you.

Timing is ALWAYS key...even in the absolute best setups...because big storms form along thermal boundaries where there is significant gradients for baroclinicity. At our latitude that thermal gradient is very likely to include the rain/snow line! So the big snow is never geographically that far from the rain snow like. If the timing is off in either direction our snowstorms go from snow to either suppressed or rain very very easily even in a good pattern. We even mixed with sleet in 96 for gods sake! 2016 was a 30-50 mile adjustment from dry slotting 95 real bad! We never have that much wiggle room even in the best of times.

The snowstorm we got in Feb 2014. And the snowfall distribution gradient on last nights Euro looks very similar to that storm. Which does not mean "it's gonna happen" but its a good indicator of if such a storm were to happen what is is likely to look like geographically. It would likely be a storm that would likely favor NW parts of our forum. That does not mean 95 can't get snow...but most of the significant storms we have had during a positive AO/NAO favor NW with "more" snow. Feb 2014 was kind of the max end for this type of event...and there was a pretty perfect PNA EPO full latitude ridge in that case, this time we have a departing severely displaced TPV leaving a cold antecedent airmass to our northeast as the driving mechanism. It's not the worst setup ever but it would take a bit of luck to score a big hit.

Had that vortex been at 50/50 it could have been a hecs. That was our chance at a 96 type non Nino fluke. But it’s not bad luck imo, reality is it takes a lot of good luck to get everything 100% perfect which is what it takes to get a hecs in a non Nino

If we don’t get anymore snow I’ll be really close. But I think we will

Let see what the impact is when the pdo is positive.

With how much cold there will be around I think our chances of scoring in the likely Feb pattern is higher than normal given that H5 look...cold will press behind each wave giving us a window of opportunity.

it phases with the NS out in the midwest...that wont work no matter what the exact location of the features is.

I took the 8 best analogs in the last 30 years...threw out the high and low outliers and came up with an over under for snow from Feb 1 to the end of winter for various locations. IAD: 8" DCA: 4" BWI: 5" Manchester MD: 17"

I'm cool with some 4" solid ice solution that glaciates my snowpack to help it last maybe an extra week once the warm up hits lol

I actually don't think it "flopped" this last time...it nailed the general location of that wave from over a week out! It always had the max qpf a little NW of 95. In the end it was too liberal on the SE side of the precip band by about 50 miles but the AI is low resolution and I warned it would smooth out details and wouldn't see something like a sharp gradient. That's where the high res models should have helped but they failed us lol. THe AI should be used to give us a general idea of a storm and it did that...it failed at the details its not really meant for. Just my opinion.

I think the lowlands have a good chance to score more snow this year...if not before things warm in Feb in March. But while it's definitely ended up a little colder/snowier than I anticipated it's still following some of the colder cold neutral or weak enso analogs like 2009 that were identified pre-season. They were "cold" but not particularly snowy. There has been a bit of that...and if 2009 actually is the best analog as I've proposed we actually have got a little lucker this year than we did that year where we had 2 months of cold but barely got any snow until March. Because we've been so freaking warm so often lately we forget how common it is to get cold but not snowy periods...or at least how common that used to be. Because our biggest issue has been its just too warm lately...some have started to think "just give me the cold and I'll take my chances" but that does not always work out.

BTW I am not debbing this threat...was just giving a more accurate description of exactly what that AI run was showing. This is probably our next and last threat for a bigger snow event for a while....after this we are rooting for a well timed follow up wave and likely our high end would be a 2-4" type thing until we reload the pattern sometime in later Feb. Timing up the MJO we are likely looking at sometime between Feb 20-March 1 for that. I don't think the MJO is the be all and its not doing some grand amplified warm phase run that says shut the lights...but our best pattern did time up with the cold phases of the MJO and it will be harder when its partially traversing the MC and extreme west PAC to keep the boundary under us most of the time.