Winter 2019-2020 Discussion

[dryslot]

26 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

I'd take the former over the latter....92-93 was bookended by two of the best events of my life. 

Back to back good winters here too, But man, Looking at those maps i posted there was some real bow wows for many in the 80's, Can't imagine how some that post in here would be if that happened again for several years now..........lol

[Torch Tiger]

regression depression already sinking in?

[powderfreak]

5 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

Yeah I hate using percent of normal for snowfall...it's not apples to apples between sites.

 

Need to use sigma (standard dev) instead to standardize it. But I think too many people's eyes gloss over when we start talking about a 1 sigma or a half sigma snowfall season.

Lol yup.  I throw my laptop every time I see a forecast saying say 50% or 150% of normal or something across NNE because it means that forecaster hasn’t actually thought about anything related to climo. 

What they really mean is like 85% or 115% of normal...those are sort of more in the realm of our “bad” and “good” years.  

[uncle W]

I had my eye on 1959-60 and 1992-93 for a while...59-60 is my top analogue as of now...both had big March storms...

[raindancewx]

It doesn't seem to apply outside the Boston to Philly corridor, east of the hills, but with last year included the "low solar El Ninos (generally)= fairly low snowfall" held up pretty well, and I had based that on the 1890s-2010s last year. This is total monthly sunspots July-June, divided by 12, for El Ninos in Boston. I've done statistical tests on this nationally, and solar stuff seems to impact precip/snow/temps when the annualized sunspot number centered on winter is 50 or less. 

El Nino	Sun Jul-J	Bos Snow
1899	18.2	25.0
1900	8.6	17.5
1902	18.7	42.0
1911	5.4	31.6
1913	7.4	39.0
1914	44.5	22.3
1923	14.6	29.8
1930	46.3	40.8
1953	9.5	23.6
1963	29.1	63.0
1965	37.1	44.1
1976	23.2	58.5
1986	19.1	42.5
1994	36.9	14.9
2006	20.1	17.1
2009	13.2	35.7
2018	5.5	27.4
Mean	21.0	33.8

If you do July-Jun for annualized sunspots, the highest snow in an El Nino with low solar in like 63 inches in 17 tries. So my point is if I'm wrong and an El Nino develops I'd actually expect my snowfall totals for the NE to be too high. I like 1992-93/1953-54 in some ways for precipitation more than temps, but you have some pretty warm spells in those periods if you how to time it right, Sept wasn't too far off nationally for temps from 1953 either. I'll show you guys my snow map next week - it is pretty detailed nationally. I don't see any reason to change it for now.

[tamarack]

16 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Lol yup.  I throw my laptop every time I see a forecast saying say 50% or 150% of normal or something across NNE because it means that forecaster hasn’t actually thought about anything related to climo. 

What they really mean is like 85% or 115% of normal...those are sort of more in the realm of our “bad” and “good” years.  

Many years back when we lived in Fort Kent, an Aroostook dealer of snowblowers promised a 1 rebate if CAR snowfall that next winter was less than 50%.  The CAR average for 79 winters is 114" and the lowest on record is 59" - pretty safe for the dealer.

[J.Spin]

19 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Lol yup.  I throw my laptop every time I see a forecast saying say 50% or 150% of normal or something across NNE because it means that forecaster hasn’t actually thought about anything related to climo. 

What they really mean is like 85% or 115% of normal...those are sort of more in the realm of our “bad” and “good” years.  

Yeah, up here we LOL at the 50%/150% projections.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see what 150% would be like, since it would be pushing 250” here at the house and 500” in the mountains, but that’s not how our climate works.  One S.D. here is probably less than 20%, so 50% is 2.5 S.D., which should happen only once every couple hundred years or so.

[Typhoon Tip]

7 hours ago, tamarack said:

Many years back when we lived in Fort Kent, an Aroostook dealer of snowblowers promised a 1 rebate if CAR snowfall that next winter was less than 50%.  The CAR average for 79 winters is 114" and the lowest on record is 59" - pretty safe for the dealer.

Interesting...

Man, who sells snowblower's requiring internal combustion engines spewing contributory greenhouse gasses to the on-going AGW thing ... which concomitantly increases the odds of lesser and lesser snow fall, bets on more snow fall.  The only reason that fails the obvious irony is that it'll take probably beyond his immediate generation/life before it is realized - but that's fascinating.  If there were cross-generational moral culpability even capable in this species called Human Kind - which dey ain't   - that philosophically becomes substantive. 

heh.  Tongue-in-cheek, still true..  I mean, obviously.. the carbon footprint of a snowblower ..negligible.  20 or 30 million?  mm..

It's funny this opportunity to soap-box presented its self. Because I just dropped my lawn-mower off at a repair shop yesterday, because the rip-chord had come out of it's housing and slipped under the cutting draft and got sucked in and ...well... eegh.   Anyway, I was out there mulling in the lawn, culling the reminders of the season... when it dawned on me: why am I paying for a device that I really should not be using?   One of the many thoughts that pass through the transom of one's mind.  A single lawn-mower doesn't mean much ... but, 100,000,000 of them across N. America?  ...let alone the world when it comes to either of these 'luxury' devices, may add a footprint that's only adding to the problem.

I always look around me and these sort of things dawn on me.  You know?  We think of AGW as smoke-stacks ... and coal, and car industries and the power generation for the grid.  It's probable if all these forms of industrialized societies were to be entirely green in some ... utopian future ( which ain't happenin' before a lot of people have to die first most likely... ( cynic, sue me! ) ), then the Earth might be able to absorb the contribution of mower, blowers, and front end loaders. 

 

[Ginx snewx]

44 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Interesting...

Man, who sells snowblower's requiring internal combustion engines spewing contributory greenhouse gasses to the on-going AGW thing ... which concomitantly increases the odds of lesser and lesser snow fall, bets on more snow fall.  The only reason that fails the obvious irony is that it'll take probably beyond his immediate generation/life before it is realized - but that's fascinating.  If there were cross-generational moral culpability even capable in this species called Human Kind - which dey ain't   - that philosophically becomes substantive. 

heh.  Tongue-in-cheek, still true..  I mean, obviously.. the carbon footprint of a snowblower ..negligible.  20 or 30 million?  mm..

It's funny this opportunity to soap-box presented its self. Because I just dropped my lawn-mower off at a repair shop yesterday, because the rip-chord had come out of it's housing and slipped under the cutting draft and got sucked in and ...well... eegh.   Anyway, I was out there mulling in the lawn, culling the reminders of the season... when it dawned on me: why am I paying for a device that I really should not be using?   One of the many thoughts that pass through the transom of one's mind.  A single lawn-mower doesn't mean much ... but, 100,000,000 of them across N. America?  ...let alone the world when it comes to either of these 'luxury' devices, may add a footprint that's only adding to the problem.

I always look around me and these sort of thing dawn on me.  You know?  We think of AGW as smoke-stacks ... and coal, and car industries and the power generation for the grid.  It's probable if all these forms of industrialized societies were to be entirely green in some ... utopian future ( which ain't happenin' before a lot of people have to die first most likely... ( cynic, sue me! ) ), then the Earth might be able to absorb the contribution of mower, blowers, and front end loaders. 

 

Look forward to using my blower a lot. I am totally impressed by the electric battery operated options out there and actually bought a battery operated chainsaw that was awesome. Of course it requires electricity to charge and the battery when dead is haz mat and to build one uses tons of precious earth metals. Its nice to imagine a world without combustion engines but not enough people understand the pollution ramifications of alternative energy. There is no free lunch. 

[Typhoon Tip]

2 hours ago, Ginx snewx said:

Look forward to using my blower a lot. I am totally impressed by the electric battery operated options out there and actually bought a battery operated chainsaw that was awesome. Of course it requires electricity to charge and the battery when dead is haz mat and to build one uses tons of precious earth metals. Its nice to imagine a world without combustion engines but not enough people understand the pollution ramifications of alternative energy. There is no free lunch. 

yeah... notwithstanding, there's alternative technologies, both plausible and coming out, such that rip and roar machinery isn't really the only option anymore.  And, it can't be so there we go. As far as 'precious metals' in batteries; I'm less impressed with that as any form of limitation. Those are easier to reclamation than plastic. Besides, those options are vastly more appealing in the nearer term than the definite consequence of profligate combustion of fossil fuels.

I guess one of the aspects I was dancing around there is that this whole AGW stuff ...if true ( and to some percentage I wouldn't care to debate in here, most likely is...) the total spectrum of contributory sources is more vast than we may think. It's childish not to consider the entire frame-work of modern Industrialism in that. 

Par for the course ... The industrial revolution and pretty much all of society's constructs are scaffolded by oil and fossil fuels.  You didn't ask but ... I've often thought it funny that it took the planet say ... 100,000,000 to 500,000,5000 years to sequester all the presently accessible fossil fuel stows, both solid and liquid... Humanity, with conceit and ingenuity ... comes along and threatens to liberate all that reactive chemistry back to the reactive system in as little as 200 or 300 years:   No problem.   what ?  We expect to do so without consequence? 

I mean... it seems so intuitively preposterous that the debate can't actually happen before the pitchers of water are set upon on the folding tables and the hall even starts to fill.  There is no debate.  Intuition tells us alone that we own the vast majority % of the cause of jolt environmental changes that are empirically being measured... 

But, maybe the intuitive model is wrong - who knows. 

You're right...that 'free-lunch' thing?  I don't actually blame humanity for the "crisis" - should it ultimately deemed so.  Evolution started this - we did our best as species to adapt and survive, and as the peregrinations of mutation and Darwinism would have it, we ended up with brains as our beast - that is how we've won - so far - this fight.  Otherwise, folks may not realize this but a human being is, pound vs pound, the weakest organism on the planet. That's the trade off - unfortunately, the irony of the weakest beings owning the greater power comes greater responsibility. 

One thing I wanna add in this hugely inappropriate discussion for a winter outlook thread ( haha, sorry guys ), it bothers me when mankind refers to inventions of mankind, as unnatural. I got a mathematical wake up call for us all:   what ever is inside the foreseeable cosmic boundaries ( i.e., the Universe itself) IS f'ing natural, and that includes whatever, nature invents.

Plastic - totally natural

Global warming by man kind - totally natural

why?  Because the men and women that made it happen are totally natural.  Take humancentric egoism out of the equation, nature invented plastic and a warming planet.

When one really sets down and thinks long and hard what that means... they may start to melt away the morality of it all, as just as constructed as the society that is doing the "damage" - nature does not care ... this planet... it doesn't care.  

But that's not what is paramount.  We care...  we care because, if we want to have a planet, a planet that requires a complex self-sustaining and healthy ecosystem at all scales and dimension within which we indirectly, but all importantly, need for our own survival we need to use what evolution provided humanity with:  moral circuitry.  It make us ..instinctually compelled to conserve that which promotes our own survival... And if self-preservation is an instinct we should ( and actually do... ) all possess, than not exacerbating the egregious situation of climate change is a recourse we need to set upon. 

I think all this bear relevancy because the problem with the denying this and that counter-culture is a sociological one, and that starts with how those with wisdom present to those that have less. A good part of which is in not being accusatory for what we needed to do to survive - we just need to strive to do it a different way. That intuitively seems like a better tact for reaching people. As far as captains of Industry that don't care to consider beyond their own life span, so they may as well reap now ...thankfully, that form of sociopathy is not more powerful than the masses, should they concede to the better form of the message and approbate accordingly.

[weathafella]

53 minutes ago, Ginx snewx said:

Look forward to using my blower a lot. I am totally impressed by the electric battery operated options out there and actually bought a battery operated chainsaw that was awesome. Of course it requires electricity to charge and the battery when dead is haz mat and to build one uses tons of precious earth metals. Its nice to imagine a world without combustion engines but not enough people understand the pollution ramifications of alternative energy. There is no free lunch. 

I operated a battery driven chainsaw to clear debris and big limbs after an overnight blow in July.  I’m hooked!  Regarding disposal-true but I suspect that day is beyond my lifespan.  I’m definitely going to consider battery operated snow blower-will be canning my snow guy after this winter.

[Hailstoned]

1 hour ago, weathafella said:

I operated a battery driven chainsaw to clear debris and big limbs after an overnight blow in July.  I’m hooked!  Regarding disposal-true but I suspect that day is beyond my lifespan.  I’m definitely going to consider battery operated snow blower-will be canning my snow guy after this winter.

I've got a battery that drives an electric chain saw-- am equally impressed and will never use a gas powered one again-- and also powers any other small size yard equipment made by that company. In addition, I've been using an electric powered rider mower that runs on conventional car batteries, and has plenty of charge to handle in one mowing, a couple of acres of lawn on varied terrain.

[Dan76]

Bunch of battery powered stuff in this,battery's look pretty stout.

 

[Ginx snewx]

4 minutes ago, Dan76 said:

Bunch of battery powered stuff in this,battery's look pretty stout.

 

I swear by all my Kobalt interchangeable battery operated equipment 

[CoastalWx]

Have a battery powered hedge trimmer. Thing works awesome.

[tamarack]

17 hours ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Interesting...

Man, who sells snowblower's requiring internal combustion engines spewing contributory greenhouse gasses to the on-going AGW thing ... which concomitantly increases the odds of lesser and lesser snow fall, bets on more snow fall.  The only reason that fails the obvious irony is that it'll take probably beyond his immediate generation/life before it is realized - but that's fascinating.  If there were cross-generational moral culpability even capable in this species called Human Kind - which dey ain't   - that philosophically becomes substantive. 

heh.  Tongue-in-cheek, still true..  I mean, obviously.. the carbon footprint of a snowblower ..negligible.  20 or 30 million?  mm..

It's funny this opportunity to soap-box presented its self. Because I just dropped my lawn-mower off at a repair shop yesterday, because the rip-chord had come out of it's housing and slipped under the cutting draft and got sucked in and ...well... eegh.   Anyway, I was out there mulling in the lawn, culling the reminders of the season... when it dawned on me: why am I paying for a device that I really should not be using?   One of the many thoughts that pass through the transom of one's mind.  A single lawn-mower doesn't mean much ... but, 100,000,000 of them across N. America?  ...let alone the world when it comes to either of these 'luxury' devices, may add a footprint that's only adding to the problem.

I always look around me and these sort of things dawn on me.  You know?  We think of AGW as smoke-stacks ... and coal, and car industries and the power generation for the grid.  It's probable if all these forms of industrialized societies were to be entirely green in some ... utopian future ( which ain't happenin' before a lot of people have to die first most likely... ( cynic, sue me! ) ), then the Earth might be able to absorb the contribution of mower, blowers, and front end loaders. 

 

That offer (and it was a 10% rebate - typo) occurred at least 40 years ago, when pundits were (incorrectly, of course) worrying about a new ice age.  And when I was still using a snow scoop to clear Fort Kent's average of 130" while we lived there.   

[Ginx snewx]

Another back ended winter? Euro seasonal 

[Typhoon Tip]

It's the new GW standard ...  model's admit to winter next summer

[Typhoon Tip]

Yeah ... battery powered airlines ... Come fly united!

that'll be cool... 

it would be really neat if there was a discovery of some way in which to manipulate space and time and energy like they do in Star wars or Star trek ..  it's like glowing rails and the object lifts off and cruises with no exhaust.  

2 growing to 4% according VOX data and so forth ... so, it's like remove all other forms of A VOX contributions - heh.   If we can heat all homes and drive all cars and ship all boats without puffin' out industrial farts ... maybe we can then have our lawn mowers and flights without the moral and actual physical price tag of ending our existence on this planet... because I absolutely loath raking lawns!

[ORH_wxman]

2 hours ago, Ginx snewx said:

Another back ended winter? Euro seasonal 

PAC is starting to look a little more Nina-esque.....not just ENSO region either, but the waters in the eastern GOA have been cooling recently with the warmest anomalies south of the Aleutians...that's trending toward -PDO. It isn't actually there yet, but if that trend continued, that's what it would end up as. That, along with the cool-neutral look in the tropics gives it a hint of Nina.

That might increase the odds of a more wintry December....but these things can still change of course. The waters in the N PAC can shuffle with a few big cyclones. The tropics are still the most influential...but this is something to watch.

[Typhoon Tip]

It's increasingly appearing that variances inside (+)(-) .75 SD are not forcing as prodigiously in the present era/epoch of "anthropocene" and going forward.  

In fact, I don't think ENSO is going to demo a foot print in the atmosphere at all this year... If so, it'll be coincidence... If it surges beyond some critical threshold where it's can be more effectively coupling ..thus, forcing, sure. 

 

 

 

[powderfreak]

So I was just looking back on last winter and I knew we had a great winter but I thought it was warmer than normal.

It's crazy how wrong your memory can be as I thought it was warming than normal and just cold enough to snow a bunch.

The reality is last winter was pretty fukkin' cold from the departures up here:

MVL ASOS

November... -5.0

December...  -2.6

January... -3.5

February... -1.6

March... -3.5

November through March averaged -3.2F below average.

How the hell do I not remember last winter as a cold one?  Maybe its the SNE numbers or something.

[ORH_wxman]

46 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

So I was just looking back on last winter and I knew we had a great winter but I thought it was warmer than normal.

It's crazy how wrong your memory can be as I thought it was warming than normal and just cold enough to snow a bunch.

The reality is last winter was pretty fukkin' cold from the departures up here:

MVL ASOS

November... -5.0

December...  -2.6

January... -3.5

February... -1.6

March... -3.5

November through March averaged -3.2F below average.

How the hell do I not remember last winter as a cold one?  Maybe its the SNE numbers or something.

MVL is prob a bit colder than others, but overall it was colder than average up north....even down into SNE too. November being included flips SNE negative. ORH was about dead nuts normal without November included (-0.3F without November vs -1.2F with):

 

 

 

 

[40/70 Benchmark]

3 hours ago, Typhoon Tip said:

It's increasingly appearing that variances inside (+)(-) .75 SD are not forcing as prodigiously in the present era/epoch of "anthropocene" and going forward.  

In fact, I don't think ENSO is going to demo a foot print in the atmosphere at all this year... If so, it'll be coincidence... If it surges beyond some critical threshold where it's can be more effectively coupling ..thus, forcing, sure. 

 

 

 

I think its a bit too hasty to definitively procliam any typical manifestation of weak ENSO as purely coincidental.

[ORH_wxman]

It's part of the reason I think I would definitely roll the dice again on last year's pattern in the pike region. I know others had disagreed, but I think we caught a lot of "unlucky" breaks (or rather, some undesirable small scale perturbations within the large scale pattern for those who are triggered by the work "luck")...it wasn't a great pattern, but we typically snow more in that type of setup than last year. We had an unusual lack of good front enders/triple pointers here considering the source region of the storms along with the mean temps.

[Ginx snewx]

43 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

It's part of the reason I think I would definitely roll the dice again on last year's pattern in the pike region. I know others had disagreed, but I think we caught a lot of "unlucky" breaks (or rather, some undesirable small scale perturbations within the large scale pattern for those who are triggered by the work "luck")...it wasn't a great pattern, but we typically snow more in that type of setup than last year. We had an unusual lack of good front enders/triple pointers here considering the source region of the storms along with the mean temps.

I am all set with SW waa events in marginal cold. Hope this year is weighted ed LPs traveling south of LI.. 

[powderfreak]

55 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

MVL is prob a bit colder than others, but overall it was colder than average up north....even down into SNE too. November being included flips SNE negative. ORH was about dead nuts normal without November included (-0.3F without November vs -1.2F with):

I just didn’t remember it ever feeling real cold but I guess you get that when the bookend month’s of say Nov/Dec and Mar have higher departures.  February, the coldest month had the warmest departure.   Honestly that’s probably a perfect way to run a winter...coldest at the bookends and then not as big of departures during climo coldest time.  

Though I will say, January up here had to be the most enjoyable way to run a -3.5 departure.  Looking at dailies it does look like it was overnight mins that were cold and the daytime temps weren’t bad when folks were out and about.  

A day where it’s -17F in the morning but 15-20F in the afternoon, is solidly below normal mean but that afternoon in January in NVT is pretty comfortable.  We had 15 mornings below 0F in January but none of that was like those days of -15F that only rise to -5F in the afternoon....just a lot of cold mornings and more tolerable afternoons.  

There’s probably some decent feedback with consistent, deep snow cover starting early in November that likely fed back into colder mins...sort of maximizing the air masses we did have as far as cold goes in a radiating climate spot like the valleys here east of the Spine.

[ORH_wxman]

1 hour ago, powderfreak said:

I just didn’t remember it ever feeling real cold but I guess you get that when the bookend month’s of say Nov/Dec and Mar have higher departures.  February, the coldest month had the warmest departure.   Honestly that’s probably a perfect way to run a winter...coldest at the bookends and then not as big of departures during climo coldest time.  

Though I will say, January up here had to be the most enjoyable way to run a -3.5 departure.  Looking at dailies it does look like it was overnight mins that were cold and the daytime temps weren’t bad when folks were out and about.  

A day where it’s -17F in the morning but 15-20F in the afternoon, is solidly below normal mean but that afternoon in January in NVT is pretty comfortable.  We had 15 mornings below 0F in January but none of that was like those days of -15F that only rise to -5F in the afternoon....just a lot of cold mornings and more tolerable afternoons.  

There’s probably some decent feedback with consistent, deep snow cover starting early in November that likely fed back into colder mins...sort of maximizing the air masses we did have as far as cold goes in a radiating climate spot like the valleys here east of the Spine.

There was a lot of really cold air masses oozing over the top last winter. You can tell from the map where the upper plains were frigid.

ORH actually had their coldest max temp since 1994 (1F for a high tying 1994) last winter. There were some impressive airmasses. We just couldn't quite get those good highs that give interior SNE big snows on the front end of a lot of those systems. Obviously the deeper cold in NNE was able to which is why there was a big snowfall gradient. 

[Typhoon Tip]

5 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

It's part of the reason I think I would definitely roll the dice again on last year's pattern in the pike region. I know others had disagreed, but I think we caught a lot of "unlucky" breaks (or rather, some undesirable small scale perturbations within the large scale pattern for those who are triggered by the work "luck")...it wasn't a great pattern, but we typically snow more in that type of setup than last year. We had an unusual lack of good front enders/triple pointers here considering the source region of the storms along with the mean temps.

Do you think the overall velocity surplus might have played destructive interference role?

[40/70 Benchmark]

8 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

It's part of the reason I think I would definitely roll the dice again on last year's pattern in the pike region. I know others had disagreed, but I think we caught a lot of "unlucky" breaks (or rather, some undesirable small scale perturbations within the large scale pattern for those who are triggered by the work "luck")...it wasn't a great pattern, but we typically snow more in that type of setup than last year. We had an unusual lack of good front enders/triple pointers here considering the source region of the storms along with the mean temps.

Agree.