psuhoffman

@RevWarReenactor they might not have "lied" to you, simply fallen to a common misconception. West can help wrt snowfall...but only if you get far enough west to enter another climate zone. The reason west helps is because of the contour of the elevation zones in the mid atlantic. If you go far enough west you get out of the coastal plain and into the Piedmont. Go far enough west and you get out of the Piedmont and into the mountains. With each elevation increase you enter a better climate zone for snowfall. But within each zone...north/south matters more than east/west. You can see that with these snowfall maps here...I continued the approximate contours from the NJ map to help show how once you hit the fall line...snowfall totals turn southwest due to the climate zone change...but within the coastal plain the contours run more west to east. You can see on the Maryland snowfall map how there is a tight gradient along the fall line. Had you moved 15 miles further northwest THEN you would have seen a dramatic change in your snowfall. But moving east and west within the coastal plain won't make much difference. Within each climate zone local meso scale terrain features like ridges and water matter more. So being right along the immediate coast...like on the barrier islands...will get less snow than 10 miles inland. But once inland a little snowfall won't usually change much going another 10 miles east or west. Someone right along the Delaware river will get less snow than someone 250 feet higher up in South Jersey for instance. Look at where you are on that MD map...you had the misfortune of moving into a local snowfall minimum also...a region that is between the Chesapeake bay and Delaware river...at very low elevation. Warmth floods up the bay and river.... you have a downsloping wind from every direction...and a wind off water from many directions. You are in a bad local area also. When I moved from southern NJ to northern VA I did see an increase in snow...but only because I went from the coastal plain to the Piedmont. Had I moved somewhere 15 miles further southeast in VA I would have actually gotten less snow than where I used to live southeast of Philly. Elevation is the reason going west helps...but if you go west and do NOT increase your elevation...you really aren't doing yourself any good. And if you go west and put yourself into a local snow hole due to terrain features you can even get less. I get way more snow than places west of me in the valley there. Hope this helps explain the real phenomenon you are describing.

If they get enough snow in the poconos or deep creek I’ll take the kids up to play and go sledding Saturday so I’m tracking for that reason. But for our area even if we get some banding outside elevation areas boundary temps are ugly. Taking my 5 year old to ski at Liberty Sunday. Should be nice and warm, perfect to learn at his age.

You are 100% right. Just because he is being a clown doesn’t excuse me doing it. I just wanted to make sure people knew my posts to other people were in good faith and not trolling.

No prob. My posts to Ji and Maestro wrt probabilities are legit good faith posts though, just to be clear. It’s just a bonus that it irks Mersky. But the troll replies to him I will confine to banter.

The inv trough has been the only thing worth keeping an eye on for a while with that. But that will be a meso scale feature guidance can’t pin down any more than the details on a line of thunderstorms from range.

Knowing general probabilities is good for setting realistic long term expectations but useless for making shorter term forecasts. For instance we know if we flip a coin 1000 times you will likely get about 500 heads. But within that there can be a run of tails. The long term trends don’t help predict each specific flip. Our snowfall has a lot of randomness. Over the long run it will even out but year to year using those probabilities is dangerous. Once we are in a specific pattern looking at analogs to that pattern is more indicative of expectations than the overall probabilities for all years. Yes it’s rare to get really low snowfall like this overall BUT the analogs to this pattern have some of our worst snowfall years. Plus many of those years what little snow we got cake early before this pattern set in sometime in January. We had a few chances at that but mostly missed. Most of the analogs had very little or no snow the rest of winter once this pattern set in. So that data set is more useful and more pessimistic than the long term general probabilities. I will end on the positive that a couple of the analogs did luck into a snow in March. Not the majority but enough to say it’s possible. History suggests the chances for snow in years like this are early before the dominant winter longwave pattern sets in and very late as short wavelengths creates added chaos.

I highly doubt that since it’s currently just emerging from the Okhotsk Sea. It would really have to rocket to be in Ohio in 12 hours.

I’m still not buying it one bit, not even a little. But that is the best ensemble run for a specific discreet threat all winter. That said nope. Not biting.

So the preponderance of evidence has a storm there but its north and warm.... and the one guidance that has a known severe cold bias is cold/south...hmmm... wonder what is going to happen.

So you’re telling me there’s a chance... Ok the crazy stupid over amplified solution aside I suppose there is always the chance at something. The 1976 scenario. That year was very similar pattern and results then our area got a foot of snow mid March from a storm that has no business working in a crap pattern. So there is always that fluke chance...but my money is in this just being one more kick to the nads.

I know how this ends...

It's better to be a smart ass than a dumb ass

Well....in 1632 the colony of Maryland was granted to Sir George Calvert. in 1781 MD was the 7th State to ratify the Articles of Confederation. In 1788 MD also became the 7th State the ratify the Constitution and officially join the United States of America. Baltimore was one of the major port cities of America and crucial to the early economic success of the State. By the onset of the Civil War, due to a changing economy and labor movements, about half of the African American population in MD was already freed and the institution was being phased out and this played a part, along with political and military pressure(occupation), in Maryland not joining the confederacy. The steel and rail industry continued to be a major economic boon to the Baltimore region in the late 1800s and a driving force of Maryland's political and economic power. The great migration in the 1900s greatly influenced the demographics and society of Baltimore. An influx of African American workers from the deep south injected a more "southern" feel to the culture of Baltimore while providing the steel, shipping, and rail industries with needed workers to drive economic growth. Unfortunately the practice of white flight and red lining (see racist ass-clowns) in response to the great migration, combined with after effects of the great depression, which some communities would never recover from, set up a cycle of generational poverty the Baltimore area is still struggling with today. Despite that fact the Baltimore area remains the dominant economic force of Maryland, despite the resentment of some rural regions (see bumbleF*#%) of the State. This divide has become the driving force of politics in Maryland in recent decades. Hope that helps

First of all I hope you don't find this antagonistic. I don't find any of this to be hostile. We have different opinions but it's an interesting conversation that is all. It has been a crappy run for snow. I am not happy with the results either. But I am taking a purely statistics and probabilities side here. In the last 10 years DCA had 4 years above average. That still holds with the long term "normal" frequency. Those years can sometimes come in chunks with long periods in between...that has always been the case. There is a very random distribution to our big snowfall years. You have to look at the frequency over longer periods of time when you have that kind of distribution to see real trends versus just random noise. Like a coin flip. You can get 5 heads in a row...and think that is a trend...but if you step back and look over 20 or 30 flips you are more likely to see it even out towards the 50/50 probability. Over the long term the odds of a big snowfall year is about 30% and we will have runs of good or bad within but over the longer term it usually ends up evening out to about that 30% chance. I am not trying to say its been a good run for snow. Its been crappy. But the problem is we live somewhere that crappy is kind of the normal base state most of the time. I am just accepting that reality. Not saying you should be happy about it. WRT your take on different years...and how snow comes. Again you feel how you feel...no changing that, but what you describe...late snowfalls (or even mid winter ones) that melt right away...or turn to rain and get washed away...or imperfect storms that dry slot us...that describes A LOT of our snow. If you start to toss years that got to a decent result but did it with "flawed" storms you end up making our already crappy climo even worse. For instance if you remove the "good snow years" in DC where most of that snow came from one big storm OR most of that snow came late in the season then you end up tossing "good years" like 1960, 1972, 1983, 2000, 2015, 2016, 2019... take those away and now your probabilities of a "good year" go down to like 20% if not worse. On top of that a lot of the "mediocre" years become awful if you toss one big storm years...like 2006, or years where most of the snow came from flawed melty storms or late season storms....like 2018. Do that and now the chances of a total crap season goes up even more. So I get why you don't "like" those storms as much...I just don't think you get how rare what you "want" really is. How common has it been for us to get a winter where we get a lot of snow from multiple "cold" storms? How many of those have happened in the last 30 years? 1996, 2003, 2010, 2014, 2015... is that it? Am I missing any? If not that is 5 times in 30 years... that's only 17% of the time. You only have a 17% chance of getting that in any given year. I am not saying that isn't what you should want...and I want that too...I just realize how rare that is around here. I also think you are mis remembering some years. 2002 DC only had 3.2". It was 2003 that was great and that was a nino year. 2004 was only 12.5" so it was decent but not a "good" year, especially by your standards. 2006 DC had 13.6" and most of it came from one storm that was a meltathon right after so doesn't that fall into the type of years you say you don't like? 2008 was only 4.9 all of it came from a clipper in early Dec and then two 1" slush storms. I highly doubt you really thought that was "decent" at the time. 2009 was 7.5" almost all from one storm in March that melted the next day. So.... You are saying some of those werent that bad but they were every bit as bad as some of the years in the last 10 that you complained constantly that they sucked as they were happening. They were all way worse than 2018 was in your location and you hated that year when it was actually happening. I think time has a tendency to edit our memories. 15 years from now maybe all I will remember from this winter is that one good snowstorm I got in January and the day in the snow with my children and it won't seem as bad. But the numbers don't lie.

There is no winter so every thread is banter right now till next non winter Overall I think the main thread stayed impressively on topic and functional this year given the train wreck that was winter. There was some off topic fun but it never got in the way when there were legit pattern discussions going on. I don’t mind some fun it was when people were actively trying to disrupt and discourage legit analysis that got annoying imo. There was none of that this year. That said she is right and some people want to discuss severe or the horrors of having to wear a jacket in April so we shouldn’t junk it up now either.

That last post definitely belonged in banter. Sorry. The discussion with Maestro and ji was legit though. It is just a wag but it is my best guess ATT. It’s not worth much but the probabilities are what they are. I wasn’t making those posts JUST to troll Mersky...but if it bothers him that’s just an added bonus.

Bingo... A WAG about next year isn’t worth much. I’m not claiming it is. I’ve been transparent that it’s just a wag based on probabilities and trends. That said the probabilities favor a below avg winter. Of course that’s true EVERY year. But mostly I find it amusing that this bothers Mersky so much.

Maybe if i dig deep enough I’ll emerge out the other side of winter and it will be in the phase 8 you were predicting using the CFS.

Nino winters using January for the year 2003,2005,2007,2010,2015,2016,2019 nina years 2001,2006,2008,2009,2011,2012,2017,2018 neutral years 2002,2004,2013,2014,2020 Let me explain my rationale. This year has been awful. It’s not normal. But it is normal to get a year like this every 8 years or so. This one ended up even worse then some similar comp years with a similar pattern like 1989, 2002, 2008 but only slightly because each of those years lucked into one storm and this year didn’t. But it ended up similar to some other years like 98, 73 or 52 that also ended up pretty snowless. But these type years have been trending worse for a while. 2017 was another example where similar comp pattern years in the past might have produced 8” but recently that’s been trending down so the 3” result wasn’t shocking to me. That this year ended up with almost nothing vs the 3-4” it might have produced in a similar year 30 years ago also doesn’t shock me. That just seems to be the new normal now. But that doesn’t bother me that much because honestly would you feel better if we had eeked our way to 5” from a couple minor slush events? You know not, you complained non stop in years like that also. So who cares if our awful years are 3” instead of 5” or 1” instead of 3” now. The frequency of our “good winters” actually hasn’t changed and is still about 30%. Those are the only years you and most would be happy with the results anyways. The other 70% is some variation of suck that are mostly warm with little snow and most of that snow is flawed minor events that you toss and those years won’t make you happy whether the final total is 2” or 5” or 8”. So im not obsessing over the fact that in our typical run of 4 crap years we get every decade we end up with 27” total instead of the 32” we might have gotten 20 years ago. That seems to be the expected result of the recent trends. Im not saying this is normal. I’m saying there is no normal but that this run doesn’t fall outside of an expected result to balance out the run of luck we had earlier in the decade. I never hear you complaining about how not normal it is when we get a lot of snow.

@Maestrobjwa in all seriousness if the thought of not getting snow a year away affects your mood now that much you probably need to move somewhere that gets a lot more snow. If you need snow to be happy this just isn’t the place for you.

It’s going to do what it does regardless of how much we worry about it now.

Guidance right now is split between neutral to Nina.

That’s probably because somewhere in the back of your mind you still cling to hope. Abandon all hope and accept our fate and it will go much more smoothly.

I'm actually starting to worry about next winter. I wasn’t kidding about my 5-10” prediction. I mean it’s a WAG and totally based on probabilities BUT it’s legit. Currently odds do not favor a nino and other than ninos all other winters following years like this mostly sucked. On top of that our median snowfall since 2000 in all non nino years is 7.5”. So yea next year is probably going to suck. But look on the bright side...maybe they miscalculated and that huge asteroid this week will hit the Earth and then we won’t have to suffer through it.

I just can’t get past how picky people are being with weather. My snow needs to be between this date and that date and must stick to roads and god forbid it’s on a weekend. As if we can afford to toss so many non perfect snows here. Or if you have to put on a jacket in April...my god, the horror. I’ve had soccer games when it was close to 100 and skied when it was -25. One summer practice at PSU it was close to 95 and all they did was give us one extra water break. One late fall game against a SUNY campus in upstate NY it was 30 and snowing and we couldn’t wear layers because it would slow us down. Jesus Nut up people.