Winter 2016/2017 because its never too early

[powderfreak]

2 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

 

I def agree precip is most important. Even for a place like ORH it is more important than temps. But if you are just having to pick temps with no other information, you'd want below normal vs above normal...even up there. Though it's less dire for sure if it is above normal there vs down here....once you are down on the southern coastal plain of SNE in CT/RI...the temps definitely dominate the trend.

 

But I still think these numbers show that there is no rational reason to fear cold patterns in NNE mountains. They can be quite snowy.

Yeah agreed, I don't look at it as "fear cold patterns" as much as they aren't really necessary to me...just need normal temps and it'll likely be just as good as if it's -4F.  That may not even say it right, but more that I don't get the whole obsession with having the Polar Vortex over Montreal for a snowy winter.  

However, I will say as I start looking at monthly breakdowns, the actual days of good snows are mostly above normal departures for those days on Mansfield.  Like February 2011 was -1.0 in the means but you have stuff like 11.4" (+12.8 departure) and 10" (+2.2 departure) and the days just prior to the larger snows were a bit above.  Then it goes very cold -10 to -15 departures and you don't get anything more than like trace-3" in the snow department.  So that may be playing with my mind a bit more.  Like it's really hard to get a massive synoptic storm up here on a -10 type day.  

It's not a fear of cold patterns, just don't entirely get the obsession to get them as cold as possible...it does appear months in the +1 to -2 range are sort of the sweet spot.  

[CoastalWx]

Ginxy cold fetish.

[powderfreak]

1 hour ago, CoastalWx said:

Ginxy cold fetish.

Totally understandable...if I grew up near Westerly, RI then I probably would have that as well with regards to snow.  Yeah it needs to be cold to snow, but we don't always need to see a PV in southern Quebec.  Heck a transient cool shot or stationary boundary from SYR-RUT-IZG for a low to ripple along works too, lol.  If I'm looking for the KU on the SNE Beaches, then yeah I'd probably be rooting for that -3 or -4 SD cold pool over Montreal/BTV area. 

[Ginx snewx]

1 hour ago, CoastalWx said:

Ginxy cold fetish.

My theory has worked forever 

[Ginx snewx]

1 minute ago, powderfreak said:

Totally understandable...if I grew up near Westerly, RI then I probably would have that as well with regards to snow.  Yeah it needs to be cold to snow, but we don't always need a PV in southern Quebec.  Heck a transient cool shot or stationary boundary from SYR-RUT-IZG for a low to ripple along works too, lol.  If I'm looking for the KU on the SNE Beaches, then yeah I'd probably be rooting for that -3 or -4 SD H5 cold pool over Montreal/BTV area. 

except for the last 16 years I have lived inland and it still applies I mean did you just ignore Tamaracks post totally 

[Ginx snewx]

PF for a reality check run the Town of Stowe numbers as no one lives at 4k. Thats just plain silliness .

[powderfreak]

35 minutes ago, Ginx snewx said:

PF for a reality check run the Town of Stowe numbers has no one lives at 4k. Thats just plain silliness .

Sorry, thought I made it clear I was talking about the ski resort and higher elevations.  I didn't know the discussion was solely geared to our mailing address ;). 

 

[Ginx snewx]

10 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

Sorry, thought I made it clear I was talking about the ski resort and higher elevations.  I didn't know the discussion was solely geared to our mailing address ;). 

 

you referenced the RI beaches 3 times in this thread and where I grew up and post this weak rebuttal lol

[512high]

I hope everyone is having a great summer ! I am lurking and have a few questions, I have heard or read that the Northeast can expect a cold winter, however, i did not hear if they meant snow as well? average? above average?

Most recent the weather channel 90 day out look calls for above normal temps(Sept-Oct-Nov)

Thoughts?

 

ps> Hope winter is better then last season!

 

Philip

[CoastalWx]

10 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Totally understandable...if I grew up near Westerly, RI then I probably would have that as well with regards to snow.  Yeah it needs to be cold to snow, but we don't always need to see a PV in southern Quebec.  Heck a transient cool shot or stationary boundary from SYR-RUT-IZG for a low to ripple along works too, lol.  If I'm looking for the KU on the SNE Beaches, then yeah I'd probably be rooting for that -3 or -4 SD cold pool over Montreal/BTV area. 

Even then you don't need the PV over your fanny. Otherwise, it turns into March 2014 which was congrats Hudson Canyon on a few storms.

[CoastalWx]

 

AUGUST UPDATE. 

http://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/

[moneypitmike]

14 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

 

I def agree precip is most important. Even for a place like ORH it is more important than temps. But if you are just having to pick temps with no other information, you'd want below normal vs above normal...even up there. Though it's less dire for sure if it is above normal there vs down here....once you are down on the southern coastal plain of SNE in CT/RI...the temps definitely dominate the trend.

 

But I still think these numbers show that there is no rational reason to fear cold patterns in NNE mountains. They can be quite snowy.

 

I  want my qpf.

[powderfreak]

12 hours ago, Ginx snewx said:

you referenced the RI beaches 3 times in this thread and where I grew up and post this weak rebuttal lol

Were we arguing about something?  lol weak rebuttal?  Can we not look at the MMNV1 data AND talk about the coastal plain and how the climo is different?

Didnt mean to get you defensive over where you've lived, haha, just having a climo discussion with Tamarack and Will, who nicely looked up some Mansfield data.

[CoastalWx]

22 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

Were we arguing about something?  lol weak rebuttal?  Can we not look at the MMNV1 data AND talk about the coastal plain and how the climo is different?

Didnt mean to get you defensive over where you've lived, haha, just having a climo discussion with Tamarack and Will, who nicely looked up some Mansfield data.

 

The whole takeaway is that some colder than normal is good for NNE...but you don't need a 490 pig sitting over Quebec City either. I understand where you are coming from. 

[powderfreak]

37 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

 

The whole takeaway is that some colder than normal is good for NNE...but you don't need a 490 pig sitting over Quebec City either. I understand where you are coming from. 

Yeah don't fear anything in either direction, just fear the crazy departures in either direction....last night looking at some stuff in the past 10 years, and it's all over the place.  Big snow months with departures of -3 or +4 then you find a month that's -5 in January with awful snow or a +10 like last December that's also awful. Seems the further away from "normal" the departures get the more 

Precip is the correlation in all these months though, haha.  Rarely see above normal precip and below normal snow (except some recent months) but it's amazingly tied to precip.

Cold/wet is good, cold/dry no.  Warm/wet can work, warm/dry no.  Cold/dry is probably the most frustrating combo for many though lol.  

[Typhoon Tip]

2 hours ago, CoastalWx said:

 

AUGUST UPDATE. 

http://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/

from my own efforts to compare ...and admittedly, my correlations stop at linearity, the 'bell curve' of higher than normal snow fall years (assuming that's what people care about) occur closer to neutral than any of these wildly SD ENSO extremes.

however, there are extreme snow total years (at more than one climate site combined) that could be defined as occurring during less(more) warm(cool) SSTs, and vice versa; but I stopped shy of breaking the NINO districts out into quadrature. 

what all those big words mean is that last winter, ...regardless of what actually transpired... , the linear 1::1 correlations never supported much - which probably seems counter-intuitive at this point due to the tsunamis of faux fear-mongering that leads to 'concept-conditioning', by an irresponsible 'industrialized media complex' that attempts to mold common perceptions along a path toward keeping people tuned in so they can make more money of the delusions they create...  you know? it used to be said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses" - now, the term Religion in that maxim can be traded with Mass-media.. 

but i digress...

in reality, there is in fact a correlation between extreme(r) Nina and Nino states and climate bias; what the problem is is that something like snow in New England apparently occurs if not closer than most think, close enough to equal probability to do so that you can have snow during any of those Pacific states; that by default, neutral ENSO states are going to be more common (biased cool or warm when it does), that means that more snow will happen during neutral.  and that makes 'intuitive math' sense, because more neutral than SD, more snow - duh.

if it helps, think of it this way: we are far enough N in latitude, in a stream-line region of the PNAP circulation base-line area, that even a +3 December can pile up blue dense glacial pack as much as a -3 mean December can pile up inches from fluff. 

that's what all this linear graphic ...stuff looks like to me.  it almost makes it seem like most of all this stuff is rendered to a pointless hand ringing numbers game - haha - while we struggle to endure the season we loathe?  i suppose if all helps us bide the time away while we get the clock through November -

in any event ... if your into this hobby for cold season as your primary means to supple joy from life ... you may be better off with a neutral-cool or neutral-warm contribution from Pacific forcing.  at least that's what all my stuff looks like.

the other aspect ...the little baby elephant in the corner of the room ... is that the EPO and NAO, and their mummy-dadda AO, do not necessarily behave during ANY ENSO state.  related to the point about our being 'far enough north' during those years, they may overwhelm Pacific TF/MJO and so forth, too.

[ORH_wxman]

Tip I agree with you and also don't at the same time if you can hear me out....

The "weak forcing" from ENSO is exceptionally DOMINATED by the weak El Niño. Southern New England cleans up in those. It's probably real. But probably not to the extent of the actual results (I know you know what that means). We've been lucky too most likely. 

 

We we tend to get infatuated with certain setups that prodIce desirable winter wx. It's our nature. We want explanation. It's not enough to say we got lucky. We need reason. Not chaos.

Certain setups like the Davis straight block with the monster shortwave ejectioning out of the Ohio valley we know produce an awesome setup for SNE because we have a pretty undisputed result from the decent sample size. Other proclamations based on August analysis are obviously weaker and frequently more anecdotes with no empirical evidence or evidence that is so weak that it becomes basically useless. 

 

But it I do think there are circumstances that withstand the barrage of scientific vigor and skepticism. 

[weathafella]

Those ssta are pretty encouraging atm.  Let's see where it is in a month.

[medmax]

 

AUGUST UPDATE. 

http://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/

Weak Nina?

[CoastalWx]

8 hours ago, medmax said:

 

Weak Nina?

 

 Well we shall see. Seems like that's the consensus, but we still need a couple of months to figure out the alignment of SSTs and what it might mean for the cold season. 

[Randy4Confluence]

Hello from Sacramento, CA where it took 2 weeks before I saw my first cloud.

 

Needless to say, I'll miss the winters there, but my new mission is to get CA out of this drought this winter. Of course rain here, probably means warmth on the EC bUT We can give and take some. I'll pump up heights on my coast, but you have to allow me to occasionally get some westerlys off of the Pacific, k?

[40/70 Benchmark]

On August 20, 2016 at 8:01 AM, CoastalWx said:

 

AUGUST UPDATE. 

http://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/

Wow....EURO is neutral.

 

I should be able to type something up this week, once I get keyed in....finally a break from school and a vaca.

[moneypitmike]

2 hours ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

Wow....EURO is neutral.

 

I should be able to type something up this week, once I get keyed in....finally a break from school and a vaca.

Welcome back, Ray.  Winter must be in the air.....

[weathafella]

If we can get some blocking we may go full 95-96.

[CoastalWx]

5 minutes ago, weathafella said:

If we can get some blocking we may go full 95-96.

I've seen some analogs point to that, but I'm not a big analog person. Like you said, we would need some blocking.

[ORH_wxman]

I'm fairly optimistic if we have a Nino-hangover during a weak Nina or negative neutral.

 

Not the hugest sample, but it seems those types of years produced well, and did so early on. ('05, '95, '83, '66).

[tamarack]

On ‎8‎/‎19‎/‎2016 at 6:11 PM, powderfreak said:

Yeah agreed, I don't look at it as "fear cold patterns" as much as they aren't really necessary to me...just need normal temps and it'll likely be just as good as if it's -4F.  That may not even say it right, but more that I don't get the whole obsession with having the Polar Vortex over Montreal for a snowy winter.  

However, I will say as I start looking at monthly breakdowns, the actual days of good snows are mostly above normal departures for those days on Mansfield.  Like February 2011 was -1.0 in the means but you have stuff like 11.4" (+12.8 departure) and 10" (+2.2 departure) and the days just prior to the larger snows were a bit above.  Then it goes very cold -10 to -15 departures and you don't get anything more than like trace-3" in the snow department.  So that may be playing with my mind a bit more.  Like it's really hard to get a massive synoptic storm up here on a -10 type day.  

It's not a fear of cold patterns, just don't entirely get the obsession to get them as cold as possible...it does appear months in the +1 to -2 range are sort of the sweet spot.  

Lower elevations show conflicting data, at least for my favorite co-op.  Looked at Farmington's 33 storms dumping 18" or more, the earliest in 1989, the most recent in Jan 2015, for temp relation to normals:

NOV, N=2...Avg  -0.7°

DEC, N=3...Avg  -6.7°

JAN, N=6...Avg  -3.9°   (Jan 1979 storm @ -19.  In Ft. Kent my instrument hit -47, but snow stayed south.)

FEB, N=10...Avg +4.0°

MAR, N=7...Avg  -8.7°

APR, N=5...Avg  -7.6°

Jackpot month for big storms is the only one showing AN temps.  Still a rather small sample size (and odd that April has as many 18+ events as Nov-Dec combined.)

[ORH_wxman]

26 minutes ago, tamarack said:

Lower elevations show conflicting data, at least for my favorite co-op.  Looked at Farmington's 33 storms dumping 18" or more, the earliest in 1989, the most recent in Jan 2015, for temp relation to normals:

NOV, N=2...Avg  -0.7°

DEC, N=3...Avg  -6.7°

JAN, N=6...Avg  -3.9°   (Jan 1979 storm @ -19.  In Ft. Kent my instrument hit -47, but snow stayed south.)

FEB, N=10...Avg +4.0°

MAR, N=7...Avg  -8.7°

APR, N=5...Avg  -7.6°

Jackpot month for big storms is the only one showing AN temps.  Still a rather small sample size (and odd that April has as many 18+ events as Nov-Dec combined.)

 

 

I'd bet some of the reason for the discrepancy is that Mansfield at 4,000 feet is often getting warm air advection during a synoptic snow event while down lower at the surface in your region of Maine, you are getting CAD or north/northeast winds. So it's kind of an apples to oranges comparison.

 

If you are also in a location very sensitive to radiational cooling, then a snow event would be more likely to produce positive departures in mid-winter since the low temps are skewed higher due to cloud cover in a snowstorm.

[powderfreak]

31 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

 

 

I'd bet some of the reason for the discrepancy is that Mansfield at 4,000 feet is often getting warm air advection during a synoptic snow event while down lower at the surface in your region of Maine, you are getting CAD or north/northeast winds. So it's kind of an apples to oranges comparison.

 

If you are also in a location very sensitive to radiational cooling, then a snow event would be more likely to produce positive departures in mid-winter since the low temps are skewed higher due to cloud cover in a snowstorm.

Great point Will, never thought about it that way.  We generally are warmer than Tamarack in synoptic storms due to the CAD over his way, especially in any larger SWFE type system.  It'll be like 20s at all elevations here and windy while he's 14F and dead calm under the CAD inversion.

[tamarack]

1 hour ago, ORH_wxman said:

 

 

I'd bet some of the reason for the discrepancy is that Mansfield at 4,000 feet is often getting warm air advection during a synoptic snow event while down lower at the surface in your region of Maine, you are getting CAD or north/northeast winds. So it's kind of an apples to oranges comparison.

 

If you are also in a location very sensitive to radiational cooling, then a snow event would be more likely to produce positive departures in mid-winter since the low temps are skewed higher due to cloud cover in a snowstorm.

The Farmington co-op site is in the same CAD-kingdom as my location, but its being on a sidehill shelf means it's nowhere near the cold pocket where I measure.

Not sure what causes the February anomaly for big storms, other than SSS, and the BN for January storms might mean "snow in spite of cold", as the top January event (22.1" in 1/2015) ranks just 11th, behind 6 Feb storms, 2 in March, one each Nov-Dec.  Only 2 of the top 20 came in January.  By March-April, temperature obviously becomes a bigger player.