OceanStWx

PWM kicked up a sea breeze yesterday.

They looked great a week ago too.

Worst of both worlds!

Another thing to note about winds, it's not just that things shifted east but also that the low is currently around 993 mb. Quite a bit weaker than models 48 hours ago, and the trend has been for a less amplified system. So it's farther east and weaker (meaning the 925 jet is likely less than the 90-95 kt).

Ultimately that will happen. The NAM is going to go away, and the HRRR and RAP will merge into the RFS that will run out to 60 hours.

There's also a modeling cliff around 24 hours. You have guidance like the HRRR, RAP, ARW, etc that don't go much beyond that. So issuing warnings/advisories before you get to those modeling ranges can leave you wondering what happened when the damming is all of a sudden stronger than the GFS or Euro was saying.

Oh sure, the modeling three days ago looked great for wind, but that's my point. It was just a snapshot in time. A watch made sense, but we have trouble holding watches until we're truly confident on impacts. Forecasting wind gusts in stable environments is hard enough without trying to do it with 36 hours lead time.

It was clear yesterday that wind was not going to be a big threat anymore. The difficulty was that most offices had already made their wind headline decisions the night or day before. Really hard to take a warning or advisory down with 24 hours left to go. I do think we (as in the weather industry) has a bit of a confidence problem. we are confident right now, in this snapshot in time, that something will happen - but what about when the models shift in 6 or 12 hours? Speaking for GYX now, if we had waited another 12 hours to make the wind headline decisions, we would've seen the threat slipping east.

It's definitely doing the messenger shuffle east. 15z HRRR a tick east of 12z.

06z to 12z is like a 15+ degree swing in temps at PWM. That's going to be the thing to watch, is where the front sets up during the middle of the night tonight.

I'm not sure I've encountered a more difficult forecast than this one for wind. HRRR and NAM nest literally have a steady breeze at PWM but then one or two hours of 60 kt.

It's all going to depend on where the mid level front sets up. There won't be any really wind west of that. I mean that same NAM run has 8 knots at PWM and 63 knots at Cape Elizabeth.

3km has like gusts to 65 kt at Gardiner and a few miles away at AUG 7 kt.

What matters is where the mid level front is. The low level jet won't penetrate inland if the mid level front is parked right on the coast like some of the NAM runs are showing now. The farther west you can get that front, the higher the wind potential.

Since it's a blend of everything, it has the same biases as the models. So bad in CAD for instance. But it's bias correct individually at every grid point, so day to day it is quite good.

Which uses some combination of temp, RH, and lift in the DGZ. My preferred method, and available in Bufkit as an accumulation option. I believe the Max Temp in Profile would be Kuchera, Cobb has two study versions, and then there's the straight ratio slider bar option.

We're also trying to move models towards more explicit snowfall output. Like the NBM is going to start doing snowfall as a percentage of ptype. So if rain and snow is a 50/50 probability in the NBM, only half the QPF will be used as snow, multiplied by a forecast snow ratio.

Say you have a warm nose that change ptype over to sleet and that's about +2C. Kuchera would be ratio = 12 + 2(271.16-max temp). In this case 12 + 2(-4) or 4:1. Obviously much better than 10:1 sleet accumulation. Still to high but, better. But at Dendrite's place the warm nose is only -4C. Still warm enough to make some iffy snow growth, but cold enough to keep it all snow. Kuchera would be ratio = 12 + (271.16-max temp). In this case 12 + 2 or 14:1. And for each degree cooler than that you add an inch to the ratio. So you can see how it gets out of hand fast in cold environments with poor snow growth.

Kuchera will be better than 10:1 in the mixed zone, but where it is colder within the CAD it will be worse because ratios will still be about climo 10-12:1 and Kuchera will tend to make those 15+.

And that's usually going to be QPF x ratio for all frozen ptypes. Sleet? QPF x snow ratio. Rain/snow mix? QPF x snow ratio. That's why Kuchera attempts to bring in temps aloft to adjust those mixy situations down. HRRR also has a variable density snow accumulation which can work pretty well.

Always fun when the ensemble mean is 170 knots.

The flood watch and winter storm watch overlapping is great.

The current NAM/GFS forecasts just have the core of the LLJ so low that it's not hard to mix some of it down. Now there are seasonal differences between the two storms, but the Nammy is currently a more impressive forecast than it had for Oct 2017 right before the event (like 12 hour lead time). Obviously there were still leaves near the coast then, but just the magnitude of wind.

Just looking at the CT River, and it could rip for a couple hours there even, let alone VT. Nice lapse rates in the DGZ with lift still going. Could be an hour or two of snow, but could also be 2-4".