Spring Banter & General Discussion/Observations

[CoastalWx]

Still snow over here except torch south spots. My soccer field across the street is still snow covered. It definitely took a hit today. I think tomorrow will do some more damage. But spots that aren't totally sunny will hold onto this glacier for awhile. 

[aleckrohto]

10 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Still snow over here except torch south spots. My soccer field across the street is still snow covered. It definitely took a hit today. I think tomorrow will do some more damage. But spots that aren't totally sunny will hold onto this glacier for awhile. 

Still 5 inches or so here in Merrimac, MA. It was at 7 inches yesterday and it went down to 5 today. How long do you think time wise it will be to melt. Track meets start up by the 2nd week in April. Do you think it will be gone by then?

[CoastalWx]

1 minute ago, aleckrohto said:

Still 5 inches or so here in Merrimac, MA. It was at 7 inches yesterday and it went down to 5 today. How long do you think time wise it will be to melt. Track meets start up by the 2nd week in April. Do you think it will be gone by then?

Unless we get a snowstorm or two, it will be gone. It's pretty hostile for snowpack this time of year. Once 4/1 comes, the melting process really accelerates.

[Cold Miser]

Nice having 100% coverage in mid to late March.  I will lose a good chunk tomorrow but it was a good end to a rather wild pattern for the most part this winter season.

[ORH_wxman]

Can't be too disappointed with this winter given the pattern we had. We managed to get a good amount of snow out of kind of a meh pattern. We had a pretty ugly AO domain. There was a very negative PNA too, though we aren't necessarily always hurt by that. However, it can cause cutters at times, esp when the AO is positive like it was this winter, so it's no surprise that we frequently had cutters that wiped out our pack. Despite negative height anomalies sweeping into Quebec, we actually had a decent amount of warmth east of Hudson bay in Canada. The EPO/AO combo up there N of Alaska is one reason why.

 

 

 

 

[CoastalWx]

I'm definitely not disappointed in the snow we had, just seemed like the good winter months short changed us a little. It's hard to put my finger on it exactly, but it doesn't have the feel of a season that put up decent numbers.  I guess if there is one good thing, the snow was spread out in all four months. I suppose that should count for something.

[powderfreak]

1 hour ago, CoastalWx said:

Unless we get a snowstorm or two, it will be gone. It's pretty hostile for snowpack this time of year. Once 4/1 comes, the melting process really accelerates.

I agree on the hostility...full direct sun areas stand little chance the further we go.  

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

5 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

Brown landscape and mud does absolutely zero for me...so I am happy to keep the pack as long as possible. Hopefully some reinforcements this weekend.

 

Once the weather actually becomes conductive for stuff like golf, then I'm fine with it gone...but in our climate, that's usually like the 3rd week of April unless we get pretty lucky early in the month.

I get that but the earlier we warm the earlier we can do the golf. If we keep meaningless 1-2" otg until early april and spend all month drying, then its may. start now and it could be early to mid april. Different story north of the pike and up to the resorts. But out here, it is pointless in delaying the inevitable. Give us April 97 though, that would be worth it. 

[mreaves]

18 minutes ago, RUNNAWAYICEBERG said:

I get that but the earlier we warm the earlier we can do the golf. If we keep meaningless 1-2" otg until early april and spend all month drying, then its may. start now and it could be early to mid april. Different story north of the pike and up to the resorts. But out here, it is pointless in delaying the inevitable. Give us April 97 though, that would be worth it. 

I know what your sayin doesn't really apply to me because I am way north of the Pike but opening early doesn't work at at our course. We can't afford to open very far ahead of schedule. We are member a owned, semi-private course and the last time we tried to open significantly early, 2012, it nearly broke us. We had to bring staff on a month early but we didn't bring in nearly enough revenue to cover the extra expenses.   We always target April 15th but our average opening date is a week or so later. 

[HIPPYVALLEY]

6 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

Brown landscape and mud does absolutely zero for me...so I am happy to keep the pack as long as possible. Hopefully some reinforcements this weekend.

 

Once the weather actually becomes conductive for stuff like golf, then I'm fine with it gone...but in our climate, that's usually like the 3rd week of April unless we get pretty lucky early in the month.

I love the nighttime dog walk in the snow covered landscape.  Snow otg is fun, it will be gone for 7 or 8 months so I don't mind it staying as long as it wants even though it delays yard work.  I'm also in a really good retention spot so it's like a game every year to see how long it lasts. 

[ice1972]

Hey......I'm good with the weenie tag now.......thanks

[weathafella]

Judah ftl.

[JC-CT]

34 minutes ago, weathafella said:

Judah ftl.

Nothing new

[JC-CT]

9 hours ago, CoastalWx said:

I'm definitely not disappointed in the snow we had, just seemed like the good winter months short changed us a little. It's hard to put my finger on it exactly, but it doesn't have the feel of a season that put up decent numbers.  I guess if there is one good thing, the snow was spread out in all four months. I suppose that should count for something.

Retention sucked bigly

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

9 hours ago, mreaves said:

I know what your sayin doesn't really apply to me because I am way north of the Pike but opening early doesn't work at at our course. We can't afford to open very far ahead of schedule. We are member a owned, semi-private course and the last time we tried to open significantly early, 2012, it nearly broke us. We had to bring staff on a month early but we didn't bring in nearly enough revenue to cover the extra expenses.   We always target April 15th but our average opening date is a week or so later. 

Yea, it is different up there for sure. There are actually a few courses down here that stay open throughout winter, weather permitting. But many target april 1st. So, we have to melt this quickly and dry it out somewhat. The longer the snow lingers with no point besides weenie eye candy, the openings get delayed. 

[Cold Miser]

8 hours ago, ice1972 said:

Hey......I'm good with the weenie tag now.......thanks

Looks good on you. Wear it with pride.

[nzucker]

11 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

Can't be too disappointed with this winter given the pattern we had. We managed to get a good amount of snow out of kind of a meh pattern. We had a pretty ugly AO domain. There was a very negative PNA too, though we aren't necessarily always hurt by that. However, it can cause cutters at times, esp when the AO is positive like it was this winter, so it's no surprise that we frequently had cutters that wiped out our pack. Despite negative height anomalies sweeping into Quebec, we actually had a decent amount of warmth east of Hudson bay in Canada. The EPO/AO combo up there N of Alaska is one reason why.

 

 

 

 

Do you think the lingering effects of the 2015-16 Super Nino explain the warmth in Canada, despite lower H5 heights, at least in part? 

From the H5 map, it also looks as though the PV stayed on the Eurasian side of the NH...the mean PV location looks like Western Siberia and Kazakhstan...must have been a cold winter on the Eurasian plains. Generally, a PV in that area limits the cold in North America; 09-10 also had a strong Eurasian PV and we frequently had very stale airmasses. The cold winters of 13-14 and 14-15 had a Canadian PV more often.

The last feature that strikes me is the strong La Nina PAC pattern. Despite ENSO being weak, the NPAC with a displaced Aleutian ridge resembles a much stronger La Nina like 73-74, 98-99, 99-00 etc. Do you think the +QBO/low solar background enhanced the Aleutian ridge and prevented it from becoming poleward?

[Baroclinic Zone]

[Typhoon Tip]

Sort of echo those sentiments... I posted a few times mid way through how I thought relative to the pattern, we were getting HUGELY lucky.

We really had no right getting about 1/3 to 1/2 what we've totaled, based on the longer term circulation medium. That was evidenced earlier on, actually, that we were doing well despite all. 

We had a couple coastal ... remember the one the NAM nailed and the Globals flunked?  That was an example of a cold wedge that just rolled a 7 at the crappes table at precisely the right time. That air mass waits 12 hours or comes in a day too early and that's a half foot off totals right there.  That happened in a surrounding big piece of schit pattern.  It was like that at more times than usual - as I recall.  We seemed to do okay despite the look a 3 to 5 days in advance.  Interesting

[CoastalWx]

The metrics I saw showed a very potent background La Nina forcing signal. If there is one thing I have learned...the so called measure of strength by SST anomalies can mean little. The atmosphere does the talking. It's part of the reason why models were always too cold, or too long with the cold snaps in Dec-Feb. It usually went back to the background maritime continent forcing. It seems like the last few weeks have shown a coherent forcing signal just west of the dateline and it's probably not a coincidence that we've had the cold. If we actually averaged out a more -AO...my guess is this winter would have been quite snowy (way more than we had)...but getting a -AO/-NAO over the last several years has been difficult to say the least. 

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

1 minute ago, CoastalWx said:

The metrics I saw showed a very potent background La Nina forcing signal. If there is one thing I have learned...the so called measure of strength by SST anomalies can mean little. The atmosphere does the talking. It's part of the reason why models were always too cold, or too long with the cold snaps in Dec-Feb. It usually went back to the background maritime continent forcing. It seems like the last few weeks have shown a coherent forcing signal just west of the dateline and it's probably not a coincidence that we've had the cold. If we actually averaged out a more -AO...my guess is this winter would have been quite snowy (way more than we had)...but getting a -AO/-NAO over the last several years has been difficult to say the least. 

Cool. What are you thoughts about when the favorable ao/nao combo returns Judah?

[CoastalWx]

1 minute ago, RUNNAWAYICEBERG said:

Cool. What are you thoughts about when the favorable ao/nao combo returns Judah?

That's way beyond my voodoo skills. Perhaps as we enter more into the solar min, it may help. If you play the odds...I would say the next few years should offer up more of a -AO/NAO.  The interesting thing is that the summers as of late have had more of a -AO/-NAO. Some people have thought that melting ice may play a role...but I'm not convinced entirely of that.

[ORH_wxman]

26 minutes ago, nzucker said:

Do you think the lingering effects of the 2015-16 Super Nino explain the warmth in Canada, despite lower H5 heights, at least in part? 

From the H5 map, it also looks as though the PV stayed on the Eurasian side of the NH...the mean PV location looks like Western Siberia and Kazakhstan...must have been a cold winter on the Eurasian plains. Generally, a PV in that area limits the cold in North America; 09-10 also had a strong Eurasian PV and we frequently had very stale airmasses. The cold winters of 13-14 and 14-15 had a Canadian PV more often.

The last feature that strikes me is the strong La Nina PAC pattern. Despite ENSO being weak, the NPAC with a displaced Aleutian ridge resembles a much stronger La Nina like 73-74, 98-99, 99-00 etc. Do you think the +QBO/low solar background enhanced the Aleutian ridge and prevented it from becoming poleward?

Well western Canada was frigid...so I don't think it was a Nino hangover...look at that Aleutian ridge, that is screaming La Nina. We just had a crappy AO look and the EPO wasn't really poleward enough in tandem with the severely -PNA to give us better cold in eastern Canada/Great Lakes/New England. If one of those had been a little better, then it would have helped. The SE ridge was displaced to the west a bit which doesn't help either. If that sucker was centered more to the east or southeast, then we'd probably have a colder look too.

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

12 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

That's way beyond my voodoo skills. Perhaps as we enter more into the solar min, it may help. If you play the odds...I would say the next few years should offer up more of a -AO/NAO.  The interesting thing is that the summers as of late have had more of a -AO/-NAO. Some people have thought that melting ice may play a role...but I'm not convinced entirely of that.

It may be a decadel thing, whether that corresponds to solar mins and maxes I am not sure. I think Tip posted a few years back about how it runs in ten year cycles, dont recall exactly why though. It is still a largely unknown science. I also thought I saw a piece how the polar regions have recovered their ice a bit, which have been affected by the Judah being wrong last 4 years.  But that also leads to the global warming naysayers picking and choosing, then screaming that science is wrong. 

[eekuasepinniW]

 

 

[Damage In Tolland]

Nice 

[CoastalWx]

29 minutes ago, eekuasepinniW said:

 

 

That will be Brian's anemometer this summer.

[Cold Miser]

Awesome, and the guy didn't even blurt out a Holy Sh*t! or F*ck!

[dendrite]

41 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

That will be Brian's anemometer this summer.

The pole won't get obliterated like that. The coop would however.......

[Typhoon Tip]

1 hour ago, RUNNAWAYICEBERG said:

It may be a decadel thing, whether that corresponds to solar mins and maxes I am not sure. I think Tip posted a few years back about how it runs in ten year cycles, dont recall exactly why though. It is still a largely unknown science. I also thought I saw a piece how the polar regions have recovered their ice a bit, which have been affected by the Judah being wrong last 4 years.  But that also leads to the global warming naysayers picking and choosing, then screaming that science is wrong. 

I'm not sure about dedacal - unless we mean longer than intra-dedacal time spans... 

Yes I have expanded on that from time to time over the years ..but, it was regarding a multi-decadal periodicity with the AO, and sub-domain spaces of EPO and NAO.

Re the latter, it's hard to know with absolute precision or confidence whether the EPO and NAO really follow the same temporal curve, because technically they only share some half their domain space (geographically) with the Arctic Oscillation region.  However, since their shared space is a substantial large amount, 'some' collateral influence on forcing has to exist, so we wrap those up in the same package per brevity/logic. 

Having said that, the longer termed AO and NAO/EPO seems to actually follow strikingly similar to the Solar cycles - I haven't actually done a covariance test myself, but just eye-balling the various data that's out on the web (provided some refereed usefulness backing those sources...) the relationship appears way more significant than random.

Solar cycles run along a complex superposition of three different period spaces: I'm ... trying to recall off the top of the head... mm  300, 22, 11 ring bells. Don't shoot me. I've seen the total solar curve, as well as in quadrature for each one; the AO tended to land best along the 22-year cycle....But, these comparisons get increasingly based upon re-analysis ... the farther back in time. The graphs are probably more right than wrong but 300 ...1,000 ...10,000 years ago?  That's lot of ice coring to reconstruct that data.  

Not sure if Scott or whomever bases their outlook, but presently, we are nearing a duple super-position in the Solar, which means the minimum we are entering is expected to be less than normal minimum.  

That's the powder for the cake there ... the plausible reason why there is an apparent relationship between Solar cycles and AO tendencies.  The minimums are thought to allow increased residences of atmospheric ozones that mix with the stratosphere and are highly conductive to certain (sorry) OLR radiation (that terminates to very high altitudes and latitudes during PW decay events) that are more common during minimums.  Contrasting maxes tend to destroy the ozone molecules.. But the former can cause temperature flashing en masse, and that's the idea behind Sudden Stratospheric Warming --> forcing the AOs negative.   

Anyway, regardless of cause.. I've also read other papers about the subject matter - that and AMO too for that matter.