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Winter 2013 - 2014 Banter Thread


NEG NAO

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Norfolk, Connecticut, is a small village in the northwestern corner of the state, about 5 miles south of the Massachusetts border.  It is situated in Litchfield County and has an elevation of 1337 feet above mean sea level.  The remarkable thing about this town is that its average annual snowfall was, from 1952 -1973, a whopping 110 inches...the same amount of snow that falls in Caribou, Maine in a normal year.  Even Pittsfield, Massachusetts (elevation 1170 feet) only receives 78 inches per year - and Pittsfield is 30 miles north-northwest of Norfolk.  The average has come down a bit over the past 40 years or so...down to the mid 90's...but still exceptional.  

 

Norfolk is snowier than Pittsfield because Norfolk is on the eastern slopes of the Litchfield Hills and easterly winds are forced upslope, creating orographic enhancement of the precipitation. Pittsfield is on the western slopes of the Berkshires and stormy east winds sink and compress as they come down the hills, promoting drying.  Moreover, Norfolk is near the top of a quasi-plateau, and this is even more snow inducing than being on a mountaintop, as it tends to wring all the moisture out of the air. Many years ago, when I first heard of the incredible (for a non-lake effect station) snow totals that are often recorded in Norfolk, I did not believe them.  So, I drove up to the town on a few occasions immediately following storms that had brought a mixed bag of precipitation to southern New England, and there was never less than a foot of snow on the ground in the village of Norfolk.  But it still seems astonishing that this town,  just 60 miles north of Bridgeport, can rack up such impressive snow amounts.

 

 

Sounds like a nice town

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We are going to need to be patient. This is a classic evolution of a pattern like this with the polar vortex dropping south before it elongates. Everybody will start screaming cold and dry, cold and dry, the pattern busted, etc etc. And all of a sudden as the PV moves north and/or elongates, you'll start seeing the parade of threats showing up on the model guidance. It is almost like an instant replay every time we go through a pattern like this.

 

Patience, patience, patience.

And surely enough, a storm has now appeared after everybody was screaming cold and dry the past few days.

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But again, the storm is not developing on the polar boundary, its on the arctic boundary, which has to press south. This means a big problem cause this will not be down to va beach in the morning. The problem is that as ugly as this looks now, a classic 6-12 storm in the I-95 corridor, a more tucked in storm could lead to the doubling of those amounts. It strikes me that long Island is the place to watch.

JB

For Ryan and William

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