Terpeast

Don’t look now, but WCS daily PDO is no longer negative for the first time in many years

Haven’t been following the forecasts lately. I got 0.76” last night. Was that within forecast range?

C+/B- ended up with 17”, just a few inches short of climo but more days with snowcover during a cold january. Got lucky with the feb storm reaching warning criteria with a sharp cutoff just to the NW of me. Biggest storm of the season 7.5”

It’s interesting that athough the pac jet was stronger again this year, it was placed more equatorward compared to other recent winters since 2019. Makes sense as the south saw a lot of snow relative to their climo.

Heavy rain not much wind. 0.38" so far

I'll be in the WV mountains late march. Maybe a late season snow in the apps is in play...

Still shows a storm, but a miss to the south. Temps not great.

Latest CPC ENSO update backed off a double dip nina through SON. We’ll see if it continues to trend toward +ENSO or neutral.

Don't know why everyone is so downbeat. We're still awaiting cold to come the first week of march, and I was originally thinking the window of mar 4-10 we may have a shot, but with the -PNA being delayed by the euro ensembles, that window may be extended a bit longer. Maybe we're just burned out? That I can understand!

This is a great question. I think this is more true in the warm seasons as the poles warm much more relatively. But in the cold season, the poles are still cold even if anomalously warm, while extratropical latitudes stay summer-like warm (with all those 580-590+ dm ridges being more commonplace) - it's easy to imagine that the lat temp gradient gets even more compressed in the mid-latitudes. Granted it's not always the case everywhere, but I think it's becoming more common.

That does make a lot of sense when I think about it. And when we look at ocean warming in terms of absolute temperature instead of anomalies, it's easy to see how mid-latitude jets over both oceans would become anomalously strong as we've seen in recent years.

Fair. The 15-20% drop I saw was based on the 1962 starting point. If dulles airport was built in the late 1800s and I could go further back then, then I think the drop in snow climo would be even more pronounced, too.

Actually I started at 1962, where IAD data begins. So I'm really starting from one of the coldest (and relatively snowier) periods in the 20th century save for the early 1900s.

I know it doesn't feel like it now, but the fact that all the southern areas cashing in at least puts to bed the theory that snowstorm tracks are moving further north and cutting us out. We're still good. If anything, we lost maybe 15-20% of our usual snow climo in the long term. Like Bob Chill, I have a feeling that the next 5-10 winters will be more closer to climo compared to the last 8 years and include at least one big dog, maybe two.

The issue was extremely dry air east of the blue ridge and north of 29. Not sure that was foreseen, but I think a lot of precip evaporated before reaching the ground.