OceanStWx

After a few DIPAs all bets are off.

There may not have been much up there, the office had 10”

We definitely had garbage ratios for a while. Sometime between 8 and 11 it picked up, but I passed out after my last mid. There was so much water in the pack that the shadows had the blue glacial color.

That’s just about the Bufkit Cobb average of the NAM, GFS, HRRR from 00z Tue. I’m really annoyed I talked myself out of advisories in southern half of NH. Yeah, as that 850 low developed that warm snow sliced east rather than surged north.

7.2” but lost a bit to taint I’m sure. I had 4.7” at midnight.

Hat tip to the HRRR sand HREF (which does use he NAM) too. We look like we held off the taint pretty well in PWM. Headed out to clear the snow now.

Good inversion just about summit level, so most likely downslope winds. We definitely don’t have the observer networks BTV and ALY do in downslope regions, so we don’t here about it as much.

Never a good idea to stray too far from 10:1 in a SWFE.

Basically if we forecast it, it will be on there. We don't explicitly forecast sleet totals, so they can't be determined.

Rain is the total liquid eq. in 6 hourly periods. Snow would be all frozen in 6 hourly periods.

Melting layer is a little farther north over CNY than models were forecasting, but it's also getting beat back a bit. So not a game changer yet.

That's a nice WCB

The major difference between those products is averaging. The P&C is the accumulation for the grid you click on. The ZFP is the average for the zone (larger area, larger differences in totals). And the WSW is an average for multiple zones (ever larger differences in totals). Whether they end up average higher or lower is relative to where your P&C is. I'm in the coastal Cumberland zone, but the far western part of it. So in a typical coastal gradient event, my P&C will be highest, the ZFP lower, and if the WSW was just coastal zones that may be even lower.

Oh we stole PoWT a long time ago. It's tough when modeling always has us in 15-20:1 ratios, but at least it knocks things back when we go over to predominately something other than snow.

Yeah I was keeping an eye on my old DVN stomping grounds and saw the forecasts getting upgraded for FZRA. I've also noticed that here in the Northeast anyway, all the offices are forecasting snow ratio grids and deriving snow from that. And well modeling is not great with that (usually too high), and snowfall trends that way as a result.

That warmth aloft is always hard to stop. 00z HRRR, NAM, and GFS all have sub-warning amounts for the southern half of NH. Scooter caution flags everywhere right now.

We're 6" here, I think CAR and ALY are 7", we're all 4" for advisory north of BOX and OKX.

It's hard to argue impact based sub-warning criteria events in February up here. The real question here is for places like CON on south. The GFS has the 6-7" of snow and sleet, that's a fine warning. But the NAM has 3.1" snow and sleet, that's technically not even advisory level. So our thinking was give it one more model cycle. Honestly the ME zones were probably more likely slam dunk 6" before a changeover, but the timing is later for those zones too.

I'm pretty sure we cannot require the FAA to take observations for us. They do hire companies or observers themselves to take manual obs at the larger airports though. The NWS hires observers to take our snow obs for LCD sites (as long as we can find someone that lives near enough the airport). We pay someone to do CON and PWM, GYX obviously we take care of, MHT we use the FAA contract observer so the quality is a little lower than our standards (since the FAA does not require 6 hourly snowfall), and AUG we can't find anyone willing. We tried this once and Eastern Region was not a fan. ALY actually had a local policy that was exactly this, combo of snow, sleet, freezing rain equaling warning criteria (e.g. 3" of snow is 50% and 0.25" ice is 50%, therefore you had 100% warning). Even though it was still written in the regional directive supplement they told us no and removed it from the directive with the next update. Ekster and I tried. It was a storm we knew had no hope of hitting 6", but it was written as an option in the directive so we went with warnings. So we were pissed that our policy document led us astray in the end.

Wild that model doesn't have sleet getting into NH until after 06z. At 03z it's off from the HREF by about 100 miles.

It definitely snowed, but the Mauna Loa ob is still reported as "M" as far as I can see. So that means they are ahead of BOS for the season too right?

17/-5 at PWM, with a nice north breeze too. Feels like foreshadowing. It's too bad that 700 low over APN doesn't give two Scooter shit streaks about that.

St. Paddy's Day or bust.

Amazing how investigating modeling has also shown us the way to go with these systems.

Big caution flags.