What is the Biggest Snowstorm That is Theoretically Possible For Us

[SnowenOutThere]

Just something fun to think about for our region while we wait for winter to start. Anything goes the question is : what is the largest snowstorm (snowfall wise) that this area could see focusing on the 1-95 area. Anything is allowed as long as it is remotely possible, could be a thousand year or even ten thousand year but as long as there is a chance it could happen. In other words just a fun thought experiment

[SnowenOutThere]

Thinking that it would most likely be a storm with a direct access to a tropical moisture source or even a decaying hurricane running into a cold air block caused by a high over Canada that would stall out near Atlantic City. It would stall due to a strong high over the Northeast preventing it escaping. Due to the stall it would just sit there for a week feeding off the tropical moisture access shoveling the moisture over the region causing heavy snow for several days. Don't know the max possible with a storm but if banding sets up right probably plus 70 inches of snow.

[midatlanticweather]

10 minutes ago, SnowenOutThere said:

Thinking that it would most likely be a storm with a direct access to a tropical moisture source or even a decaying hurricane running into a cold air block caused by a high over Canada that would stall out near Atlantic City. It would stall due to a strong high over the Northeast preventing it escaping. Due to the stall it would just sit there for a week feeding off the tropical moisture access shoveling the moisture over the region causing heavy snow for several days. Don't know the max possible with a storm but if banding sets up right probably plus 70 inches of snow.

I think Snowverboard Blizzard in Feb 09 - 10  2010 put down 50 inches in parts of Maryland! someone would have to confirm.. Maybe that was together with Snowmaggeden from a few days earlier, but I do not think so.

 

[Kmlwx]

Probably around 3ft in the more populated areas (not including south and east of the fall line). 

[WinterWxLuvr]

Didn’t PD2 give parts of the panhandle up to 4’?

Otherwise I’d say the 40” we got here in 2016 is about the max.

[osfan24]

I'd guess somewhere around 50 inches would be the max, maybe a little less. A lot of people have seen 36-40 just west of the cities.

[Eskimo Joe]

https://patch.com/maryland/perryhall/snowiest-day-record-when-baltimore-county-saw-most-snowfall

[poolz1]

47 minutes ago, osfan24 said:

I'd guess somewhere around 50 inches would be the max, maybe a little less. A lot of people have seen 36-40 just west of the cities.

That amount was my thought exactly.  4-5" qpf.  Some of the factors that give us our biggest totals are a hindrance to Sierra style snows.  We need a constant moisture fetch but too long of a duration will usually wreck the mids resulting in epic meltdowns.  Occlusion will happen at some point and shut down the death band. A lack of significant orographic lift if we are talking just around 95.  No other body of water to offer additional enhancement. 

[GramaxRefugee]

15 minutes ago, Eskimo Joe said:

https://patch.com/maryland/perryhall/snowiest-day-record-when-baltimore-county-saw-most-snowfall

That seems to be 24 hour records. I got the impression Snowen is thinking of a 3 day event. Heck, either is OK for me.

I think a station in HoCo measured a bit over 50" in Feb 2010. 

[mattie g]

31 minutes ago, poolz1 said:

That amount was my thought exactly.  4-5" qpf.  Some of the factors that give us our biggest totals are a hindrance to Sierra style snows.  We need a constant moisture fetch but too long of a duration will usually wreck the mids resulting in epic meltdowns.  Occlusion will happen at some point and shut down the death band. A lack of significant orographic lift if we are talking just around 95.  No other body of water to offer additional enhancement. 

I think this is a really good breakdown of how the areas outside of the highest elevations would be relatively hindered. We'd need a system that bombs and stalls at just the right spot to pull in cold air from a fresh, frigid airmass to our north (this happens in our long-duration monsters). Even then, the storm would eventually occlude unless there were some sort of moisture and energy fetch from the tropics to keep it going. The likelihood of these two things happening in tandem is incredibly low, though I *suppose* it's possible.

[SnowenOutThere]

46 minutes ago, GramaxRefugee said:

That seems to be 24 hour records. I got the impression Snowen is thinking of a 3 day event. Heck, either is OK for me.

I think a station in HoCo measured a bit over 50" in Feb 2010. 

Yeah Im just going for whatever is even on the realm of possibility, doesn't have to have any historical analog but just needs to be technically possible which is why I went up to 70 inches of snow. Sure its never happened before but I think if everything came together perfectly it might possible. I am almost in this thread going for what could be the best possible storm however unlikely for our area and wanted to hear from people who are far smarter than me at meteorology. 

[Cobalt]

If you're talking about in the cities, our "ideal" setup has probably happened, but perhaps it wasn't maximized. 2 ideas come to mind for me. 1 would be a PD2 2 pronged type system, but perhaps with a stout NAO or just something other than that one-off monster 50/50 low to maintain confluence and to prevent the mid levels from warming so fast, since that WAA was killer, and the areas that didn't switch to sleet easily saw upper 20s and even 30+". The 2nd would be something like Snowmageddon, but with a substantially cooler start. I believe DC got up to 37 or 38 during the start of the storm, and that easily cut down on totals. Drop temps 10-15 degrees and allow for greater than 10:1 ratios on the start, some areas reached 3"+ QPF so naturally, if ratios were better with similar or slightly greater precip, you'd expect a biblical result. 

 

I guess you could go off the deep end and assume that a '93 redux further east would do the trick, or maybe a '58 like stall with what the Euro showed for like 2 runs for Jan 31-Feb 2nd last year, but of course in the dead of winter rather than late March. 

[Jebman]

I suppose Dale City could theoretically see 36 inches of snow in a Jan 22 2016 type setup. That storm was all snow and it simply piled up.

[yoda]

Pretty sure there was something for I think the Jan 2016 storm that had 70" at KIAD... a model run or something... I have to go find it.  Might have been off of the hilarous DGEX when it was run

[Eskimo Joe]

9 hours ago, yoda said:

Pretty sure there was something for I think the Jan 2016 storm that had 70" at KIAD... a model run or something... I have to go find it.  Might have been off of the hilarous DGEX when it was run

The prolonged storm last winter had 1 run where the NAM put 50" out for the Catoctin Mts.

[Roger Smith]

The biggest snowstorm in recent years happened after the warmest December, so the argument that the current warming climate will cap this potential is inherently weak. The distribution of extreme precip events tends to swing wider from the median than temperatures which rarely do what I experienced here this summer, a 5 degree increase on long-term extremes. It is not so surprising when a new rainfall record for a given location is twice the value of the old one it replaces. 

Subjectively, I don't imagine that snowstorms from 2010 and 2016 will be beaten in this coming decade but would you bet against them being edged out within a century? So I think maybe the answer to this question is around 40" and possibly more. A very high snowfall total for one storm in your region would definitely require a stalled low tucked into the coast in a suitably cold regime. This rarely happens but there is no theoretical reason why it couldn't happen. 

If there was a natural variability change to colder climates, which probably will happen at some point in the next century or two, then the odds of such an event would improve. So I would hazard the guess that if anyone retrieves this thread in the year 2100 and checks it out, they will be talking about the 35 to 40 inch snowstorm of 2063 or some such thing, and wondering did we hoary ancients foresee such a thing? I just did.