Winter 2019-2020 Discussion

[tamarack]

12 hours ago, dryslot said:

Even multiple 12" storms are not all that easy to pull off in a season, I've had season here where we had none but still had an above avg winter because of more falling in the 6-8" ranges.

My snowiest winter (07-08) south of Fort Kent reached 12" just once, 12.5" on Jan. 1-2, with only the Dec. 3-4 storm reaching double digits.  That winter my biggest storm was only 8.8% of total snowfall, whereas 4 years earlier the 24" on Dec. 6-7, 2003 was 33.0% of that winter's snow.  Add the 13" a week-plus later and over 50% of the snow came by 12/15.
 

For ORH, since 1950, there have been 80 events of 12"+....but obviously some winters go without one. So in those 69 winters, 44 of them had at least one 12"+ event.

Farmington's 126-year POR shows 147 events of 12"+, which is an average of 1.17 per year, and at least one in 83 winters, for 66%.  My 21 winters have featured 27 such storms with at least one in 14, for averages of 1.24/winter and 67% of winters with one or more.  For those same 21 winters, Farmington has recorded 27 storms of 12"+ (1.29/yr) and also 14 with at least one, though they missed in 07-08 (only 11.3" on Jan. 1-2) while having 2 last winter while I topped out with 11.7" on Jan. 19-20.
 

And BOS has 4, two of 2 feet+, 2 of 16 inches from 1/22/15-2/28/15.  Think about that.

When I think about that, it's with some frustration.  Storm #1 dumped 20" of 9:1 sand at single-digit temps at home in the best January storm to hit my then-BY in my lifetime.  Unfortunately we were in SNJ at the time where we got to watch their 1.5" disappear in about 3 hours.  Got to shovel/snow-blow it all when we got home about 12 hours after final flakes, however.    Storm #2 was 7.5" with most coming at -5 or colder, #3 brought 4.6" from the storm's northern fringe and #4 is known by some at GYX as the V-Day massacre because the massive blizzard-warned event fled eastward, dropping 1.5" at home and 25" in Machias.

[J.Spin]

15 hours ago, mreaves said:

The 3”-8” range is our bread and butter. We all have different weather favorites and mine is retention and base depth. Some prefer the big dogs but as long as I have enough to ride, that’s my jam. 

I’m trying to think of the best way to check on that with respect to using my data, but smaller storms are just more frequent than larger storms in general, so one would really have to compare distributions of storm sizes among different sites.  From my data set, the whole number averages for occurrence of storms per season based on some common accumulation thresholds of 3” or more are as follows:

 

3”+:  15

4”+:  12

6”+:  7

8”+:  5

10”+:  4

12”+:  3

15”+:  2

20”+:  1

24”+:  0.5

 

I went with whole numbers for simplicity, but all the mean values are actually within a tenth or two of these numbers.  I had to round to the nearest 0.5 for the 24”+ storms because they are relatively infrequent.

I can certainly get analysis for percentages in certain storm size ranges if there are specific ranges that people want to compare to.

[J.Spin]

23 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

12 inches is a large storm...esp if it has to come from synoptic precip. That's probably a much better benchmark to use for blockbusters.

ORH has never had more than 4 storms of 12"+ in one season. They've done exactly 4 a few times.....in 2010-2011, 1995-1996, 1957-1958 with 2014-2015 and 1965-1966 narrowly missing 4 events. BOS made 4 events in 2014-2015.

Although not pulling off the 3 x 24” in one season, while looking through the data I did find another related occurrence to go along with the 6 x 12” from 2010-2011.  In 2008-2009, there were 12 storms of 6” or more, which is the only season in my data set hitting that number.  The 6” mark is another threshold for significant storms since it’s around that base Winter Storm Warning level (from what I understand, our criteria here are 6” in 9 hours or 9” in 24 hours?).  As PF will point out though, with the extended nature of storm cycles up here, there are probably a number of 6” storms that won’t warrant a Winter Storm Warning.

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

On 11/18/2019 at 8:38 PM, Snow88 said:

Anthony Masiello‏ @antmasiello

Pretty classic -NAO sequence ahead. It's in its formative stages now.

We should be heading towards another multi-year predominantly -nao look:

 

 

[raindancewx]

CFS has a +10 SOI in December...

It was +9.14 in Dec 2018.

[40/70 Benchmark]

The back half of winter is going to be reliant on the NAO IMO. As far as December goes, I think there will be a wintery stretch, but the rubber band will likely snap back on any SSW and we likely go mild later in the month into January.