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The March Long Range Discussion Thread, Winter's Last Stand


stormtracker
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19 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

There are some characteristics regarding the depth of the warm anomalies and the current wind burst that COULD imply we get another nino next year.  But we are WAY WAY WAY too far out to get into that yet.  Even if we did get another nino... what type, central/east based, what strength?  and both those answers matter a lot to our snowfall prospects which is what most care about here.  

 

Exactly, need to get through the spring barrier and see what things look like in late summer. 

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Wow, to the warmth extending North in the Atlantic . A 122 record broken in Aberdeenshire. Not sure the consequence of this or the next two ocean storms next week. 

I really like to see some sort of -NAO but maybe we do not need it , some mets are saying it would help next week to achieve some sort of -NAO, , others say it is not needed and the other 1/3 camp are sort of mixed. 

 

 

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Bob made a good point in the other thread we should remember...the pattern is favorable for storms early March, but having the blocking centered in the EPO domain and extending east vs in the NAO domain extending west...means the flow will be more progressive across the CONUS and there will be more variability wrt any storm track near the east coast.   So this is not the kind of pattern where storms are likely to lock in on guidance at long leads.

That doesn't mean we can't win here...we have had snowy March's from a similar EPO based blocking pattern in 1960, 1965, 1978, 1984, 1993, 1996, 2014, and 2015.  There were even a few blockbuster storms in there in 1960 and 1993 and we just missed a HECS that fringed us to the south in 1980 which was another close pattern match.  It's a pretty good pattern to get snow in March BUT not one we will likely be able to get a really good read on any specific threat at long range.  

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@frd regarding enso, this will be part of my end of year retrospective but since you were talking about a possible nino next year thought I would throw it out there.  

What we really want is a moderate/strong modoki/central based Nino.  Anything else really doesn't do it for us.  

I went through and filtered out all the nino years by modoki/traditional and strength (and I used the older traditional modoki classification where if the nino originated in the central PAC and propagated east before regressing westward it was modoki regardless if it took on basin wide characteristics for a time as most do).  Here are the findings and snowfall for BWI  

Weak Modoki years using January: 1959, 1969, 1978, 1980, 1995, 2005, 2015.   Average snowfall 18.05"

Moderate/strong Modoki years: 1958, 1964, 1966, 1987, 1992, 2003, 2010.  Average snowfall 43.14. 

The only one that wasn't a historic winter was 1992 and most agree the eruption of Pinatubo significantly changed the patterns that year.  

Weak Traditional nino: 1952, 1954, 1970, 1977, 2007: avg snowfall 15.86"

Moderate: 1988 yea only one year lol, don't know what to make of that.  Snowfall 20.4"

Strong: 1973, 1983, 1998, 2016: avg 18.78" but with an obvious trend...2 of those years had one HECS and the other 2 did not and we got almost no snow in those.  

But the bottom line is the only type of nino that is actually good for us and raises our average snowfall above climo is a moderate/strong modoki.   Keep that in mind going forward.

Regarding this year...looks like this modoki weak fell into line with what I SHOULD have been expecting.  Weak modoki tend to be variable but none were blockbusters...a few were duds, but many of them were basically what this year has been...meh.  

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