OceanStWx

I think this is my point. An ice storm by definition is damaging, if it wasn't damaging it was a freezing rain event.

If you get 0.5" of ice from freezing drizzle, absolutely. Generally you aren't seeing significant impacts to trees/power lines until you get over about 0.33" radial ice accumulation (which is just over 0.8" flat surface accumulation, roughly 40% reduction). New England has traditionally always verified based on 0.5" radial, but turns out NWS wants that to be 0.5" flat. That's crazy for New England, because that's not even 0.2" radial thickness typically. I would wager on seeing criteria change in the coming years because 0.5" is too low a flat surface thresholds for these parts.

It is a good reminder that when models show a big system that typically you can bet on some form of measurable precip. This case happens to still be a low progged to take a decent track vs. a fropa but you get my point.

Which isn't an ice storm after all. Sometimes freezing rain is freezing rain, and that's okay.

The Christmas Day happy hour GFS had a sub-940 low off Cape Cod.

I mean it will weaken, but probably not before it reaches the CT River.

MWN at 27002KT ain't going to cut it for upslope, but once it's 35G50KT in a few hours it'll be a different story.

Gotta wait for the cold front first. Ginx's WINDEX squalls are on their way. Kind of worried we didn't play them up enough today for NH.

EPS probs of 850 > 0C are starting to drop below 50% for parts of the GYX CWA.

It's what makes attribution studies so difficult. Many weather events were likely to happen on their own, but are exacerbated by climate change. Winter is going to happen regardless of how the climate changes, the question is how much better/worse is it because of those changes. A lot of climate science is known unknowns. We know things are going to change but not necessarily how or to what magnitude. Some things are easier like average temps or TC strength. Others are more difficult. But adding heat and therefore increasing the potential water vapor in the air could lead to larger areas of convection and more latent heating, which as you point out can have significant downstream knock on effects.

24.6" for the month (not including what has fallen since I left for work) and 24.9" season to date.

Yeah we're piecing the database back together, but it's kind of out of our hands as to how fast that gets done. We have all the coops B-91s but NCEI ultimately is the entity that has to change the information in the database. It'll get there eventually, but this process didn't even start until sometime after we picked up SW NH again.

Euro had a decent handle on it, albeit a little too far SE. That was the general trend in guidance, too far SE with instability.

The cold is fairly easy to predict when you see a high building towards New Brunswick. That was a big change in guidance around the morning of the 26th. Instead of the high sliding off Newfoundland, it built southeast (and got stronger). Just a classic CAD location. The easiest call I could've made yesterday was that most of the places away from the immediate coast would not sniff 32. The harder question is why the high trended stronger.

Snow is serious business. I'll steal from anyone. I think this is a key point for clown mappers. One look at 700 mb told you there was going to be a lot of sleet in NH. The natural adjustment to the forecast would have been to shift the heavier snow accumulations NE accordingly.

I know that the models overplayed the dry air eating away the northern edge of the precip. That was forecast to basically push precip back into NH for the day yesterday. Never happened and stayed predominantly snow around here. But also I want to look into why were models so warm initially only to flip to a very wintry system. Ensemble sensitivity is archived for at least a month, so I want to look into it from that perspective.

Rain never made it to my house on the Falmouth line, got close but the rain/snow line is sinking back towards Casco Bay now.

12.3" as of this morning, and still snowing. Time to dig into where guidance whiffed on this since I wasn't on shift and looking at the trends.

Woof, York and Cumberland Counties are going to be big busts for us. Totals will end up okay on the scale of busts, but messaging of a break in the precip and it just never materialized. 9.5” on the day for me.

NW RI has a cell with 40 dBZ to 32,000 ft. That's like summer convection Wiz can only dream about.

SPC did have a general thunder risk out for SNE, so not that out of the blue (severe is obviously a different story).

I mean there's like 40 knots effective shear, so yeah supercells not out of the question.

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

Two CGs and a flash there in Merrimack Co.

Congrats Dendrite.