psuhoffman

Imo it’s not one thing. It’s a bunch of tiny things. Which is why the 30,000 ft view of the pattern looks great. You have to zoom in on a lot of small details to see the flaws. Death by 1000 paper cuts 1) the kicker, I thought this might limit the setup to a MECS level not hecs level event not destroy it and I don’t think it did, runs with a storm had the kicker. But it was one of the many paper cuts. 2) the TPV didn’t detach fully. There was still a bit too much play between the main TPV and the detached lobe which kept the flow more W-E under it rather than the detached lobe acting like a true ULL pinwheel in the flow. It made the ULL act more like just an extension of the PV. This alone could have been overcome with a strong enough SS wave… 3) not a strong enough SS wave. Weak sauce that needed more of all those other minor flaws not to work against it. If we had some el Nino STJ on roids wave coming across it would have bullied through all these minor flaws and throws a ton of moisture up over this cold air. That’s why we get so many more big snows in a Nino! 4) a duel wave structure with destructive interference between the waves. The weak STJ wave starts to amplify at the exact time the NS wave over top of it was trying. We actually wanted that. Sorry I’m never rooting for some low off thr southeast coast to phase capture and bomb due north. That’s worked out like almost never. We’ve had maybe 4 MECS storms that way. Ever. That ain’t it. We want a healthy wave up into the TN valley that transfers to eastern NC or VA capes. That northern wave gets starved of moisture inflow by the wave down by New Orleans starting to amplify under it. In the end they split the energy and neither becomes the wave we need. 5) the trough takes a little too long to go negative. 6) Jim Cantore booked tickets to DC. I’m not saying he is bad luck everywhere. But not here. Never again. We should assign someone to watch every airport and tackle his ass and say “no” not on our watch.

Agree with all this. But on a side note, I (and the rest of northern MD) really needs this predominant cycle of the last 8 years where almost all our snow comes from these progressive w-e boundary waves to end. It makes sense that some of our lowlands are doing way better wrt climo than here. It takes a lot less luck in those patterns to get to climo when you avg 17” than 39” A couple lucky hits and you’re there. Up here I’m not lucking my way to a 40” that way! I need the amplified coastal to come out of retirement!

I can’t believe this is gonna produce nothing for us. This is one of our worst wasted opportunities in a long long time. This must be how Matt Ryan felt.

JB threw in the towel

@WEATHER53 you have every right to feel the way you do. Really. I’m not gonna try to change your mind. You do you! But I have the opposite perspective. As complex and chaotic as the atmosphere is with so many variables and our limited ability to sample it at every level at every location…given those realities, I’m amazed we are able to model it as well as we do! It’s so complex. I don’t feel let down by the models this week. I feel let down by me. I started getting excited about this window before the models did. When they showed up to the party it just increased my confidence more. But it’s my own excitement and desire for a major event that let me get carried away. I knew a month ago my analogs and pattern recognition weren’t 100%. When I listed the years I pointed out a couple didn’t really produce much snow. Most did. And when the models started showing big storms I started to dream this was one of those years. No hecs I never bought that the pattern didn’t say that but I was thinking secs-MECS. But that was risky. Even good pattern fail a lot. And I should have known better. I let my emotions get the better of me. That’s on me not the models.

Who, who said that? Either someone said that or they didn’t and you’re just making this up. If someone said that who.

Who was saying it can’t snow at all anymore? Who? You say “those” Who is “those”. It’s been snowing. It snowed last year. It snowed in 2023, granted like 1” lol. We got snow in 2022. It’s been snowing every freaking year. Just less. Who is this mythical “those people” saying it can’t ever snow they you are discrediting. This sounds a lot like a scarecrow argument.

I don’t know. I’m very curious though. It’s possible this method could do better at reducing errors due to sampling. Possible. I don’t know enough.

But in the case of the gfs/nam/hrrr the supplier is US! They’re all funded with public dollars. There is no profit. We aren’t defending some corporate overlords. We aren’t taking the same hostility towards these sources because we don’t share your opinion that the shortcomings of the models are some nefarious intentional design. We think the people working on them are doing the best they can and our science just isn’t as advanced as we’d like yet.

someone posted that JB comment yesterday “the better h5 gets the worse the surface gets” it got me thinking last night. And it brought be back to what you said about the upper low being “dead”. You were right. Getting a TPV stuck under a block and having a lobe tear off into the upper Midwest isn’t that unusual. It’s how several of our big snows came about. But it remaining totally disconnected from the flow and acting like a kicker instead of flow pinwheel and amplifying force is what is unusual. The detached lobe is acting more like the actual TPV than a typical ULL after detaching from a TPV. We wanted it further away not closer in that case! But I do wonder if there is a tipping point at which if it does get far enough south it has to phase v act like a kicker? That might be our only hope since we can’t get a storm with a PV sitting that close to us and the ULL is acting more like a weak PV than an ULL. This might also be why I didn’t see any in between solutions. Either snows way way south or north. This just might be a rare enough scenario though that I’m not finding any examples because the first such instance since we started keeping reliable upper level data is about to happen.

I’m not going to be sucked into defending the most extreme crazy statements “on my side” or a debate. Maybe some took it way too far. I’ve not seen a lot of that. We’ve had really good discussions and by running regression studies it looks like we’ve lost about 20% of our snowfall over the last 100 years and the trend is continuing. That’s it. I’m depressed enough about that reality without listening to some nut that takes it too far and says it’s never gonna snow again.

I’m 99% sure the gfs was simply right because of its typical errors being right in the correct direction for once. But I do wonder if the AI is less prone to errors due to estimating conditions in data sparse regions.

I only said what I said because that guys post was kinda ridiculous and hostile right off the bat. You probably could have made the point in a better way and I wouldn't have been that way.

Sorry

See now you're getting it!

@AlexD1990 my non Ass response... the mid atlantic forum is too freaking large geographically. Look at the other forums, NYC metro and Philly have their own... there is one just for PA but its really become central and western PA and the southern part is in ours and the eastern is in Philly. The geographic area "mid atlantic" is too big to have a producting regional discussion about the weather. There is almost no chance, for example, a snowstorm that crushes the southeast parts of the "Mid atlantic" even gives me flurries up here on the northern edge of the mid atlantic. And frankly I am NOT even the northern edge of the actual mid atlantic as most definitions of that include PA. But I am the northern edge of this forums arbitrary geography. The point is the weather differences between Hagerstown MD and Va Beach are way too ridiculous to be in the same thread. They are screaming YES this is awesome for the same run that makes us want to dive off a cliff. And you can't pretend this is 100% science and not emotional. Frankly this thread even restricted to the DC centric area is still difficult as MOST storms wont affect us all equally...my biggest snow this year skunked most of this thread and their two biggest snows fringed me. But at least the storms affect us. Some systems that affect parts of the larger regions dont affect us at all. So we have to have sub regional threads within this way too large geographic sub forum imo. And telling the people how to feel and post is kinda silly. That is NEVER going to work. THink about that.

yes, but do we really need to have a semantics discussion now because I misspoke?

the 12z isn't any better for me, I went from 0" to 0"

Paragraph please

I am an ass! But... they have forums to go into that are discussing this storm the way they want... you know because you are in them having that discussion. One is below. Going into another forum and telling THEM how THEY should be talking about stuff is...well, I'm not gonna take that ish seriously sorry.

Explain it in a paragraph please

Did you say something?

Maybe, but I tend to think its also what I said in my previous post...the GFS was right for the wrong reasons. Which happens sometimes. But its more likely its bias was simply playing into the what the eventual sampling errors were going to cause. It got lucky in other words. Things have changed...there was a clear trend over the last 24 hours that flattened the flow ahead of the TPV in the midwest and also a trend towards a more positively tilted trough. However, if you go back 3 days to when all guidance, even the GFS, showed what it did...under that paradigm I think the GFS was just wrong and doing its "I have trouble with complex setups" thing. Had THAT paradigm that existed even on the GFS been correct I think a more amplified storm was the correct solution. The problem was that paradigm was wrong...the flow was going to be a lot more progressive and less amplified. But the GFS in its bias was incorrectly projecting what turned out to be the correct solution for a different reason. Thats why it was starting to move in the wrong direction then had to reverse course suddenly!

We didn't start to get big model runs for Dec 2009 until inside 100 hours out. If we are going to treat 100 hour rug pulls like we used to treat the 24 hour ones...well that just shows us how far we've come. We didnt' even take 100 hours seriously back then! But a lot of our snowstorms didn't show up until around 100 hours recently. I know 2018, my last big snowstorm here, didn't look like much until inside 72 hours.

Dilly Dilly