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Memorial Day Weekend Coastal/Snow


Damage In Tolland

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LOl was just doing that, just having these discussions on Memorial day weekend is Halloween Deja vu. Man have we seen some history or what lately.

 

It def feels like before October 2011...though not quite as crazy since the population affected is much less. But the historic nature of it feels the same. If this thing had bombed a little further south, then ORH hills/Berks probably would have gotten hit pretty good.

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Well, Will is pretty tall...

Maybe MRG will open the single chair

 

 

Do we know how tall powderfreak is? I'm 6'1 so it wouldnt work on a chicks body, but if PF is tall too then who knows, lol. I guess I wasn't to be demasculinized as a met on a weatherboard. :lol:

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No way? Already? They are pretty far south and east of the crest. Hmmmm.

This is the tweet "Snowing! #oppositeworld" Whether that means, opposite to the season, or whether they mean its really raining, and they wish it was snowing, I'm not sure. But, I feel like they wouldn't post something like that if it wasn't really snowing... If it's raining, that's extremely misleading.

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Yeah I love those types of studies...snow growth really can play a large factor in the latent cooling. One reason we love to see big omega in the SGZ during marginal situations...really helps lower that FRZ level.

 

Exactly... and its one reason why people always get excited when talking about dynamical cooling. Its the non-linear relationship that heavier and larger hydrometers have on the atmosphere. And in this particular case, we have all factors working together.

 

NNW to NW winds... upslope component will produce adiabatic lift to cool the column for the NW facing slopes.

Same flow will help to enhance precipitation rates for NW facing slopes

Deformation zone with TROWAL providing additional isentropic lift above mountains.

 

The combination should allow for a very deep and moist vertical profile. This is just the sort of profile you want to have for very large dendrites that will aggregate as snow falls into the melting layer. As mentioned before, huge snowflakes decend further down in the atmosphere before melting, which allows for long isothermal layers. If the melting layer starts at 925 hPa (~ 760m ~ 2500 ft)... with very heavy precipitation rates you can oftentimes see the snow line (level at which 50% of hydrometers are still frozen) dip as much as 450m (1500 ft) below the freezing line, which means the snow line could theoretically be seen as far down as 1000 ft. Of course it all depends on the precipitation rate, but with all the factors working in our favor, especially on upslope locations, you have to like your chances, even for those between 1500-2000 feet under those especially heavy precipitation rates. 

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The key thing thats probably getting underplayed at this point is the fact that there is a substancial upslope component to the low-level wind. Not only will dynamical cooling be working in our favor, but there will also be a substancial mesoscale lowering of the snow line due to adiabatic lift.

One of our new professors actually did a large portion of his PhD. research on the mesoscale snow line lowering associated with topography.

http://www.atmos.albany.edu/facstaff/jminder/research/minder_etal_snowline.pdf

When investigating mesoscale snow line controls in high topography, the key features that affect the snow line in the mountains are:

approximently

1.) Latent Cooling from melting precipitation

2.) Microphysical Melting Distance

3.) Adiabatic Cooling

Awesome post! I see this all the time locally. A lot of folks around here who ski notice it too...we are always commenting how the snow level on the Spine (Mt Mansfield for us in Stowe) is often quite a bit lower in marginal orographic events than neighboring mountains just outside of the Spine. My town is bordered by two spines in fact...the Worcester Range to the east with a 3000-3600ft ridge line and the true Green Mountain Spine to our west. The main spine to the west gets the NW flow upslope and can have snow levels up to 1000ft lower than the Worcester Range which is like 10 miles east and outside of the better upslope assisted cooling region.

With this event I can envision something like this event...this was last April when 30" fell at 3,500ft (about the cloud level in this photo) while only 2-4" of 34F slop fell at 1500ft (where photo was taken).

Between 1500ft and 2000ft, the accumulations went up from 2-4" to like 12-15" (where the trees become caked) as that was the difference between 34F and 32F. Up higher where temps were 28-30F, over 2 feet fell on 3" of QPF.

It may pan out similar this weekend if it goes right ;)

IMG_4432_edited-1.jpg

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