OceanStWx

Yes. I'm partial to Cobb myself because it is more dynamic than other SLRs but it's not perfect around here either. It actually showed the 850-700 mb thickness as having the lowest errors in the eastern CONUS.

I know we harp on it all the time, but I just saw a post from AMS that Kuchera (or Max T aloft) has the largest errors of all the SLR. Utah is testing a new random forest SLR that shows promising results, beating all other methods out there. Like the rest it does struggle most with the extreme SLRs (too low).

The good news is that as modeled this isn't really one of those narrow laterally quasi-stationary bands. Those have the jet streak on the poleward side of the low track, with the right entrance region driving lift. This jet streak is modeled along and south of the low track, with the left exit driving lift. It looks more like a weak pivot or hybrid to me. So that should mean at least a decent precip shield to keep the threat alive.

Only 21" of snow that season. Do you just let the molasses take you at that point?

So that's a green light for more peach talk?

I think the laterally quasi-stationary bands may be my favorite. On the sliding scale of forecast difficulty they are probably tops. High risk, high reward. I would probably rank them laterally quasi-stationary, pivot (trying to nail that pivot point is the hard part), hybrid, and then laterally translating (too uniform, we need winners and losers).

I want a leaf curl hardy peach. Also eff the critters that eat them.

I don't think you're wrong. Just based on the traffic jam evacuating, I think there were a lot of people who couldn't outrun it. I think the saving grace was that it happened before it was dark.

Forecasting snow hasn't worked so far, so why not try something new?

It's in their grids. Rain, snow, and fog. Now sometimes to simplify the wording the P&C may combine the likelihood of precip for both types (i.e. chance rain and likely snow becomes rain and snow likely). The weird thing I see is BOX has chance PoP but likely snow. That shouldn't happen.

That's a misleading graphic. You have to add a bunch of snow from Dallas to the Carolinas.

I think most people don't have the concept of how fast a fire can move when they get that evacuation order. I think I heard an estimate that Palisades was moving 2-5 football fields per minute at its peak. You aren't really outrunning that, and definitely don't have time to toss a go-bag together. I know I didn't even really have a concept of how large these fires are either. You hear 1,000 acres and it just isn't a scale you deal with often. I was on a 19 acre prescribed burn in Maine last year and it was pretty damn big.

I think in this particular case maintenance wouldn't have made much difference. This type of terrain, vs the forests of northern CA, the fuel is too susceptible to rapid drying for prescribed burns to be effective in stopping fire spread, and 100 mph gusts are going to carry embers a long way. What's going to be bad is if, like Scott said, they find some jack off was chucking matches to see what would happen. It was a really good forecast. But like we've seen with other really good forecasts, sometimes that encourages people to head into the worst of it. High surf? Get swept off the rocks at Thunder Hole. River flooding? Head down to the water to see the "crest", etc.

Seems the most likely given the strength of the winds, but so far all I've seen is still under investigation. I think they said the Sunset Fire in Hollywood was suspicious.

Congrats Isles of Shoals.

I think Pacific Palisades in particular was a perfect storm of hazards are natural, disasters are man-made. It is an old neighborhood, one without the same building standards for fire as newer CA construction (fire resistant building material, safe zones around structures where no fuel sources can be planted, etc). They had prepared with three 1,000,000 gal water tanks for just that neighborhood, but the fire was so large and intense that they couldn't refill them fast enough. Fire fighting all over the city reduced the water pressure necessary to pump water back up into Pacific Palisades. It is also outside of the typical fire season and CA was lacking the usual resources at their disposal (seasonal fire fighters, and big tanker planes shared with Australia currently in their fire season). Then you have the age old dispute between CA and feds about who is to manage the land area (since the feds own way more of the land than CA does), since nobody wants to actually fund it. Altadena is its own unique thing too because they are usually sheltered from a typical Santa Ana. But this was a different beast altogether. More of a pure downslope windstorm than a gap wind event like most Santa Anas. So that was not an area where people were accustomed to fire. And there is just the fact that 80-100 mph winds are going to make fire do things that you just can't stop. It's not like the Palisades fire was contained, it just ran out of stuff to burn on its way to the ocean.

The interesting thing about these CA fires is it's all driven by boom/bust rainfall patterns. Two years ago they got abundant rain, which drove fine fuel growth, which dried out quickly as they entered another short term drought this year. Another interesting aspect is that conditions were so extreme, that even prescribed burning of these fuels would likely not have mattered. 60-90 mph wind gusts will push a fire through any type of fuel.

Just a six fingered circle jerk waiting to happen.

For the time being, AI is going to be trained off of what has happened in the past. And much of that reanalysis type stuff. In order to really suss out the details AI will need the full resolution of the atmosphere, and so it will suffer the same problems as traditional modeling in that respect. I think we'll see far more advancement in the pattern recognition type machine learning (think Colorado State severe weather stuff).

Pretty sure PWM did the same that summer. They just couldn't get cooler than 70 at night, but the thermometer was definitely reading about a degree too high.

In an era when our "cold" months are like -1.0 below normal, February 2015 was -12.8 at BOS.