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March Medium Range Discussion


nzucker

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It's no surprise that a significant snowfall past mid March is very rare and unlikely but we are in a different era than in the past.

In the past there was more global atmospheric stability with actual storm of the century events that are supposed to occur once or twice in a century, but now we are in a time of extremes.

I don't think we should consider late oct snow, big early nov snow, two hurricanes/tropical storms back to back as all being flukes. Not to mention the historical snowfalls from 09-10 and 10-11.

These are not flukes anymore, this could be commonplace now so a major storm in latter March wouldn't surprise me as much as it normally would.

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All the time - just think back to all of storms - The GFS is always behind the Euro.

Rossi

true but we have to wait and see if the EURO is for real this time around need a few more runs in a row to determine - if it still shows the east coast storm within 156 - 168 hours then its time to get serious - also time to change the title on this thread - or create a new thread for next weeks threat
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PaZzo brings up some good stats, it does get increasingly unlikely for a decent accumulating snowfall after march 15. That being said the pattern being shown by the gefs and euro screams major potential for a late season bomb, you often don't see this setup this late in the year.

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Individually given Pazzos states, it's a 10% chance of a significant march snow after 3mod month every yr. it is this 90% that if wont happen. So if we use this as our basic probabilities, the odds of 6 straight years of no significant post mid march snow would be a cumulative probability of every single year's odds. Given this, the odds of there not being a post mid march significant snow for a 6th yr in a row would be (0.9x0.9x0.9x0.9x0.9x0.9) or 53.1%.

 

 

Yep, now if we look from 3/20 on, there have been 3 occurrences of post 3/20 snow >= 5" since 1960:

3/22/1967: 9"

4/6/1982: 9.6"

3/22/1998: 5"

 

This appears to be an approx one in 15 year event, so probability in any given year is 6.67%, or a 93.33% chance of not occurring.  Given that the last occurrence was in 1998, we have the prob of it not occurring for 15 straight years (e.g. it doesn't happen this year) as 0.9333^15 or 0.355, 35.5%.

 

I guess it does look like we're due...

Wrong - these are independent events, i.e., whether we get snow in mid/late March in any one year, does not affect the probability of getting it any other year, so if the probability of getting it any single year is 6.7%, well then, that's the probability this year, regardless of what happened the past 10 years, i.e., we're not any more "due" that we are any other year.  It's like flipping a coin, which is also an independent event.  While the probability of getting tails 5 times in a row (before one starts flipping coins) is 1/32 (1/2 to the 5th power), if one gets tails 5 times in a row, the probability of getting tails on the 6th throw is still just 1/2, not some very small number.  The past has no bearing on each event. 

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If this was 1982 , we would be a month away from a potential snowstorm , not a week. Imagine those odds .

what a beautiful storm that was. I remember WINS accuweather forcaster getting on air..pausing and then saying' no April Fool's joke but a life threatening blizzard is on it way to NYC'

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