Spring Banter Thread

[David-LI]

This is the NAM 84 hours from the event. Pretty much a carbon copy. It showed that in a lot of runs. A few runs were east, but most were spot on. I will never listen to anyone who tells me not to trust the NAM past 40-50 hours.

 

 

[ag3]

I'm happy with my 7"-8" of snow/sleet. Plow piles are massive, drifts high and it looks like a 12"+ storm hit.

This is far from a bad bust. Was expecting 12" and received 7"-8". Big deal. The big busts were on LI.

[MJO812]

1 hour ago, Dark Star said:

Worst bust since January 5, 2001?  At least this forecast was revised as early as last night.  In 2001 forecasters were still calling for the snow storm even thought it had already passed!

I love snow, hate heat, but sigh, bring on Spring. Too painful, even though I figured as early as yesterday afternoon that sleet was going to mix in, hopeful that I was wrong.  Didn't measure, didn't watch the storm, stayed in bed until 9:30 AM when I heard pinging as early as 7:15 AM.

I don't remember that storm

The last big bust here was Jan 2015

[JerseyWx]

10.5" here.  It looks like a lot more because of the drifting though.

Overall a pretty big bust for my area IMO.  No model had my area getting less than 2 feet even up to yesterday.  Heck, at 2am the 04z HRRR had 22" IMBY.  Luckily I tempered my expectations for a Mid-March snowstorm.

[JerseyWx]

2 hours ago, pazzo83 said:

I'm ready to track our first 80F.

+1.  Come April, I hope we torch again.

[Enigma]

IMO, the writing was on the wall last night around 11 PM after the Mid Atlantic forum was having major mixing issues and the Correlation Coeff. mode was showing sleet moving north into Philadelphia.

[Snowman86]

So how is the threat for upcoming weekend look like. Snow/rain..temps too high discuss..

[Snowlover11]

i mean im happy with 13" but it could have been much more, and it was suppose to be much more.  I still consider it a bust. cant always win.

[Dark Star]

2 hours ago, Paragon said:

That bust wasn't in January was it?

You either mean March 2001 or January 2008 lol

You are right, the bust was March 2001.  Major league.  You don't get a bigger bust that that.  All forecasters were stubbornly persistent, except Alan Kasper.

[jm1220]

Here it was definitely a bust, like it or not. Upton's low end prediction yesterday AM here was 7" and likely was 15-16". I ended with 3.5". The NAM was the only model that did well for this area. Yesterday's 12z Euro and GFS still had 12"+. 

[real]

2 hours ago, Enigma said:

IMO, the writing was on the wall last night around 11 PM after the Mid Atlantic forum was having major mixing issues and the Correlation Coeff. mode was showing sleet moving north into Philadelphia.

Yea, you want to talk about bust, look at Philadelphia. The suburbs went under blizzard warnings yesterday at 3 pm with dire warnings of life threatening conditions. Less than 12 hours later, after only a couple inches of snow, nothing but sleetfest.

[MJO812]

3 hours ago, David-LI said:

This is the NAM 84 hours from the event. Pretty much a carbon copy. It showed that in a lot of runs. A few runs were east, but most were spot on. I will never listen to anyone who tells me not to trust the NAM past 40-50 hours.

 

 

The Nam on 2 runs did show NYC getting alot of snow

[WeatherFeen2000]

20 minutes ago, real said:

Yea, you want to talk about bust, look at Philadelphia. The suburbs went under blizzard warnings yesterday at 3 pm with dire warnings of life threatening conditions. Less than 12 hours later, after only a couple inches of snow, nothing but sleetfest.

i don't understand all the lows we're way east of there Philadelphia...so where did this warm air come in from In NYC literally as soon as the sun came out it started mixing with sleet. Maybe it has to do with the sun too and the fact that it's mid march so that sun angle could warm up the mid levels resulting melting of precipitation on the way to the ground and than the thickness of clouds refreezing because the sun isn't hitting it as much in the middle say 500 and also at the ground which is below freezing. Maybe a met could explain this a bit more. Regardless places like philly were way west of the lows. Maybe it's the geography cause Boston was in a way worse spot than philly in terms of the low but got more snow than both NYC and philly.

[tmagan]

2 minutes ago, WeatherFeen2000 said:

i don't understand all the lows we're way east of there Philadelphia...so where did this warm air come in from In NYC literally as soon as the sun came out it started mixing with sleet. Maybe it has to do with the sun too and the fact that it's mid march so that sun angle could warm up the mid levels resulting melting of precipitation on the way to the ground and than the thickness of clouds refreezing because the sun isn't hitting it as much in the middle say 500 and also at the ground which is below freezing. Maybe a met could explain this a bit more. Regardless places like philly were way west of the lows. Maybe it's the geography cause Boston was in a way worse spot than philly in terms of the low but got more snow than both NYC and philly.

It had nothing to do with the sun, it had everything to do with low pressures higher up in the atmosphere, say 700 mb, 850 mb. A rule of thumb around here is the best snows are usually 90 miles NW of the surface low.

[uncle W]

Central Park had 7.2" at 2pm...it snowed a little more with almost .10 le...the pm report still shows 7.2"...do they like go home after they take a measurement?...

[brooklynwx99]

5 minutes ago, WeatherFeen2000 said:

i don't understand all the lows we're way east of there Philadelphia...so where did this warm air come in from In NYC literally as soon as the sun came out it started mixing with sleet. Maybe it has to do with the sun too and the fact that it's mid march so that sun angle could warm up the mid levels resulting melting of precipitation on the way to the ground and than the thickness of clouds refreezing because the sun isn't hitting it as much in the middle say 500 and also at the ground which is below freezing. Maybe a met could explain this a bit more. Regardless places like philly were way west of the lows. Maybe it's the geography cause Boston was in a way worse spot than philly in terms of the low but got more snow than both NYC and philly.

It was because the 700mb low was in an unfavorable position. Since it was west of NYC, the 700mb layer was flooded with warmth, creating sleet. 

[jm1220]

9 minutes ago, uncle W said:

Central Park had 7.2" at 2pm...it snowed a little more with almost .10 le...the pm report still shows 7.2"...do they like go home after they take a measurement?...

They should have 8", whether it gets reported or not. Maybe Upton can correct the total. 

[WeatherFeen2000]

11 minutes ago, brooklynwx99 said:

It was because the 700mb low was in an unfavorable position. Since it was west of NYC, the 700mb layer was flooded with warmth, creating sleet. 

What about philly it was way east of philly?

[real]

29 minutes ago, WeatherFeen2000 said:

Maybe it's the geography cause Boston was in a way worse spot than philly in terms of the low but got more snow than both NYC and philly.

Did Boston really get more snow?  CBS Evening News 6:30 pm showed a graphic that said 4 for Boston, and they had a reporter go live from there, standing on waterfront, in the rain, on top of what looked like no more than a couple inches.  

[MJO812]

1 minute ago, real said:

Did Boston really get more snow?  CBS Evening News 6:30 pm showed a graphic that said 4 for Boston, and they had a reporter go live from there, standing on waterfront, in the rain, on top of what looked like no more than a couple inches.  

Boston only got 6

[real]

I will say this, this sleet really packs up into large snow piles. Midtown Manhattan looks like it got way more than it did. Snow piles and streets resemble a 15 inch snowstorm.

[FreeRain]

 

WEATHER SERVICE DECIDED LAST MINUTE NOT TO CUT SNOW FORECAST

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_WINTER_WEATHER_FORECAST?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-03-14-17-17-34

[SnowGoose69]

36 minutes ago, uncle W said:

Central Park had 7.2" at 2pm...it snowed a little more with almost .10 le...the pm report still shows 7.2"...do they like go home after they take a measurement?...

LGA and EWR also reported the same on the 430 climo report.  I was surprised to see none of them go up 

[JetsPens87]

43 minutes ago, Snow88 said:

The Nam on 2 runs did show NYC getting alot of snow

Right but functionally in forecasting maybe we need to focus less on each subsequent model run closer and closer to the event as more accurate (generally, yes verification scores should get higher the closer you are to the event) and rather focus more on trends and changes in the model depiction. To me, and maybe I am one of the few that uses models in this method but two runs of the NAM showing big snows even when closer to the event weighs less to me when overall it was screaming warmth regardless of the lead time to the event itself.

Basically what I am trying to say is that I would functionally weigh the NAM's (or any model) big snowfall forecast from 24 hours out much less than the NAM consistently showing less snow from even longer out.

This is just one example but could apply generally to any model.

[JetsPens87]

25 minutes ago, WeatherFeen2000 said:

What about philly it was way east of philly?

Yea but since the storm was not phased into the northern stream energy at that point it had no cold air source to pull from that could overcome the flooding of warmth going on in the mid levels. You have to remember that PHL already started with a borderline thermal profile at that latitude and even though the mid level features tracked to their east, the SE flow was able to come in unabated since the phase into the cold polar piece of energy had not occurred yet.

[dmillz25]

To be over 30" for the season after how warm this winter was is impressive to say the least 

[WeatherFeen2000]

3 minutes ago, JetsPens87 said:

Yea but since the storm was not phased into the northern stream energy at that point it had no cold air source to pull from that could overcome the flooding of warmth going on in the mid levels. You have to remember that PHL already started with a borderline thermal profile at that latitude and even though the mid level features tracked to their east, the SE flow was able to come in unabated since the phase into the cold polar piece of energy had not occurred yet.

Okay fair enough it does make some sense. Do I think you're 100% right, no but I would rate that answer an a+

 

Thank you jets

[JetsPens87]

3 minutes ago, dmillz25 said:

To be over 30" for the season after how warm this winter was is impressive to say the least 

This storm at least put my area into double digit snowfall for the season so far hah. West CNJ really has not been making out well this year.

[dmillz25]

2 minutes ago, JetsPens87 said:

This storm at least put my area into double digit snowfall for the season so far hah. West CNJ really has not been making out well this year.

Wow man that really sucks. Straight ratter of a winter for you.

[JetsPens87]

4 minutes ago, WeatherFeen2000 said:

Okay fair enough it does make some sense. Do I think you're 100% right, no but I would rate that answer an a+

 

Thank you jets

You're welcome

Another thing I should mention is that it's simply much easier for it to not snow than to snow on the coastal plain. Any warm layer no matter how shallow can simply ruin a storm on the coastal plain as we clearly saw across much of this sun forum today. And without any mechanism (phase into the northern stream) to overcome that warm layer the writing was on the wall when one looked at dual pol radar pretty much from the get go last night. Had he phase occurred at or before our latitude the storm absolutely would have been capable of overcoming that with dynamic cooling, but since there was no connection to an upper level cold source, we were just not able to work out that mid level warmth.