WxUSAF

Airport lows: BWI 24 RIC 27 DCA 30 (lol) IAD 21 eta...BWI set a record low.

The 2019 First Freeze Contest has come to an end! DCA hit 32 early this morning. @yodaand @mappy have tied! Both had a departure of 14 total days. But this is America! The tiebreaker this year was summed total October precipitation at all 4 airports. @mappy went with a continuation of our dry September and only forecasted 8" total. @yoda went a little wetter with 12.26". But the real total smashed both those numbers, with 23.5" recorded. In this case, close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and the Mid-Atlantic first freeze tiebreaker! Which means @yoda wins by tiebreaker! @mappy obviously comes in 2nd place! @MN Transplant, who unfortunately had the poor luck of trying to rely on DCA to hit 32F before midnight last night ties for 3rd place with me, your humble contest organizer, with a total departure of 15 days. @Rhino16 rounds out the top 5 with a departure of 17 days. 2019 First Freeze Contest.xlsx

@psuhoffman and @40/70 Benchmark, is 89-90 on your analog list for QBO? Or PDO? I don’t believe the ENSO matches at all...

Ok that convo is over please and thank you.

Snowflakes in Columbia per my wife! Went outside to look here in greenbelt but nothing.

Gfs long range cold bias

Flurries in Harford county per family. I haven’t seen any

Chin up, DCA will probably stay above freezing the whole night somehow.

Can you get flurries from clear skies? Asking for a friend

I hope Victoria’s Secret is lots of snow.

Yes, cold air would be getting stale for sure. 850 temps on both look chilly now, but if the low was closer to the coast, those could warm. General pattern on the ensembles as we move toward D10+ is to lose cross polar flow, but maintain a +PNA, so we could be BN but not in record territory like next week.

There’s definitely some indications of a coastal low on the GEFS and Eps for next weekend.

Be honest @yoda. We’d take it in the middle of January too and act like we didn’t care that it wasn’t 10”.

I’m rooting for first flakes. Accumulation is major bonus. I’d wager we aren’t done with snow chances for November on next Wednesday. But it is still November.

Ggem and euro both flipped back to a more amplified primary low that cuts inland. Round and round we go.

The cold shots that we’ve had and are about to have seem to have some strat influence, which is limiting the influence of the MJO as it’s moved through warm phases. Last winter, MJO dominated over the strat influence for most of the winter. MJO will get into the colder phases as we move into the 2nd half of the month and it also seems that the strat will continue to get beat up (see Mike Ventrice’s Twitter). So I think there still should be cold air around for much of the month. But what happens in December? Does the MJO heading back into warm phases have an influence? Does the decadal warm December trend happen? Or does the strat continue to help favor some cold air getting down into the eastern CONUS?

Appreciate your thoughts. Hope you’re wrong, but appreciate your thoughts nonetheless. Certainly impossible to deny that the SE ridge has been dominant this year and that winter +NAO has been a decadal trend. What do your analogs show for November? Did they suggest the cold pattern that seems likely to last the first 2-3 weeks of the month at least.

How does an ensemble mean calculate P-type?

Ok. Yeah, that’s hair splitting at D7. Still having a storm and keeping us in the game is the goal at this range. Particularly in November.

I haven’t seen all the Eps snow means for this event, but isn’t this among the best or the best yet?

Don’t know about individual members, but the 144hr EPS mean map on TT looked decent. 850 0C line just N/W of the metro corridor with low off the coast. But can see there’s still quite a bit of spread.

DT is in. Sort of. As long as the euro is. https://m.facebook.com/notes/wxriskcom/first-snow-for-some-tuesday-nov-12-seems-a-good-bet/2543156095731633/

Happy hour looks quite similar to the euro. Basically noise level change from 12z.

I know we only care how much electronic snow falls in each model run, but that was a fairly large shift on the euro. Up until this run, next week’s storm was all northern stream energy, with nothing coming out of that Baja cutoff low. GFS brings out all that energy and phases it, hence the 6z solution. What you see now in all the 12z runs (euro, gfs, and GGEM) is some of that energy coming out and phasing/partially phasing with the northern stream energy. Euro keeps the 2 pieces most separate while the North American models partially phase. Any sort of phase raises the boom/bust scenario up a notch or two. But also phasing is complicated, so don’t expect any sort of locked in scenario anytime soon. The simplest solution for first flakes for us continues to be a northern stream only vort passage that drops some light snow. I’m skeptical of a wound up inland cutter right now, but with the icon, ukie, and a handful of GEFS members showing it, I suppose it can’t be discounted yet.

Ukie also has the strong cutter apparently