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New England snowstorm memories.


CoastalWx
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I think I would have been OK with the 4" in that case. I think Ray would have tied the noose tho.

Agreed, he got totally boned because the cutoff was basically the pike for heavy precip...it got slightly north of the pike back where I am...I had 9.8" but about 10 miles north of me had 5". Super tight gradient.

I found a post where you were happy to be in Attlehole, lol:

http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?/topic/216240-sne-obsdiscussion-thread/page__view__findpost__p__4355283

"It's currently snowing as hard as it has all night...I'm loving how the stuff is getting enhanced over the coastal front as it pushes NNW. I've been waiting over 3 years for this setup... "

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Agreed, he got totally boned because the cutoff was basically the pike for heavy precip...it got slightly north of the pike back where I am...I had 9.8" but about 10 miles north of me had 5". Super tight gradient.

I found a post where you were happy to be in Attlehole, lol:

http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?/topic/216240-sne-obsdiscussion-thread/page__view__findpost__p__4355283

"It's currently snowing as hard as it has all night...I'm loving how the stuff is getting enhanced over the coastal front as it pushes NNW. I've been waiting over 3 years for this setup... "

The 15.8" I got from that was a little disappointing when I look back on it. That could have been my 20 incher. My folks got like 8-10 more than me, lol.

Banding was too transient over my place.

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The 15.8" I got from that was a little disappointing when I look back on it. That could have been my 20 incher. My folks got like 8-10 more than that, lol.

Yeah and just west of them got like 26", lol.

I am currently getting to Kevin's monster meltdown during the MLK 2010 event as I proceed through that winter. Some hilarious posts looking back on it.

I got completely f**ked in the December 2009 storm. I was lucky to pull of just under 8" as that one heavy band got to me but actually didn't reach the airport and their more western longitude. But just SE of me by about 10 miles had 14"....terrible storm.

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Yeah and just west of them got like 26", lol.

I am currently getting to Kevin's monster meltdown during the MLK 2010 event as I proceed through that winter. Some hilarious posts looking back on it.

I got completely f**ked in the December 2009 storm. I was lucky to pull of just under 8" as that one heavy band got to me but actually didn't reach the airport and their more western longitude. But just SE of me by about 10 miles had 14"....terrible storm.

post the link to when it gets good.

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This month and winter started out so good. Held so much promise. I hope we can turn things around as we end the month and head into Feb. I think we will but I'm just bumming today. Glad that some people were able to get snow in the last couple days at least. Congrats to those. This has been a nightmare month, we might not see snow for weeks.
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That was a sneaky good storm Will, not talked about very often. What was the set-up for that one? Was it a Miller B with a marginally cold airmass?

If I remember correctly, it started out as a SW flow event that transferred to a coastal. I recall the NYC people getting really excited about the 2/24 storm, and I told them they should forget about the first event since it was a SW flow situation with no arctic high to the north (you can see the -20C contour on the reanalysis maps is barely touching Northern Labrador), and concentrate on the 2/25 Snowicane. This turned out to be a prescient forecast as NYC was all rain in the first storm, but Central Park got 20" in the Snowicane while places 50 miles to the north like Highland Mills NY and Harriman NY saw over 30".

I may have gone downhill since with my mediocre Winter 10-11 forecast, but I was on a hot streak in forecasting at this point....I was repeatedly criticized in the NYC threads for suggesting that the 2/24 storm was going to be a rain event, but I went on our radio show on WRMC at Middlebury with Andrew and called for 16-20" at Middlebury (about 48 hours out) when the NWS was only forecasting like 6-10". Everyone played the storm extremely conservatively including both the BTV NWS and the TV stations, but Skier and I were convinced it was going to be solid for the Champlain Valley because we had a strong moisture stream coming south out of the Hudson Valley, which has a direct feed into the CPV, and heavy precipitation in a short period of time, which tends to reduce the downsloping effect and allow the Champlain Valley to do well compared to the more elevated areas. Usually, long-duration, light precipitation storms are when downsloping gets the best of the Middlebury area, but this was an 8-hour thump that could maximize accumulations at low elevations with marginal temperatures. Skier called for 12-16" while I went pedal to the metal and called for 16-20", both of which were FAR more than the NWS forecasts, and we ended up doing very well on the event. The campus, according to our measurements, received 20" of paste, some of the heaviest snow I'd ever seen...made for a beautiful sight on all the old buildings. When I woke up the morning of the Snowicane back in NYC, I immediately said I thought Central Park would get 20"+ based on the strong radar echoes streaming from the NE and the fact that Central Park had started as mostly snow whereas other stations like HPN/White Plains were reporting rain at 32/32 or 33/32. This was also a good forecast as they had a bit over 20", and suburbs to the north like mine got pasted.

This was the most snow I'd seen in 2 days, 46". I drove home right after the 2/24 storm, steering carefully on the snowy Vermont roads at 1am in an attempt to get home for the Snowicane despite a very heavy workload in the middle of 2nd semester of senior year. I arrived home to a rain/snow mix, slept for 6 hours, awoke to a whiteout. Those were two great storms....the first was just so unexpected because the BTV NWS and the Vermont TV stations did not give the storm the proper billing, and the Snowicane was an absolute nail-biter with the 0C 850 contour right over Westchester County...somehow I stayed all snow at 350' elevation despite mixing to my west near Nyack NY and to my northeast at HPN/White Plains Airport. The 26" I measured was not indicative of downtown, however, as I took my final measurements in the woods behind my house closer to 400' altitude. The Scarsdale Wunderground station, which is a more built-up area a couple hundred of feet lower, was at 33.9F for much of the day and did not accumulate as well. I'd say the town of Dobbs Ferry had 21-22", though I didn't measure there, just noticed the drop-off. This was such a weenie period of my life....never mind that I was in the middle of my thesis and last semester at Midd, I walked around all day during the 2/24 storm, hiking up to a hill at 800'...then I arrived home at 4am the next morning to see the Snowicane. I was glad I forecasted the event well as we had people like environmentalist Bill McKibben and a couple environmental science professors sometimes tuning in to our show.

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A rare MRG meltdown in the Dec 09 storm thread...lol. Messenger getting 20" and Pete, cirrus.

Yeah that one was pretty funny. It was right after he said it would trend into a huge hit there on that sick 18z NAM run a couple days before. :lol:

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Yeah that one was pretty funny. It was right after he said it would trend into a huge hit there on that sick 18z NAM run a couple days before. :lol:

You can count on one thing though....anytime Ray has a meltdown, somehow he pulls double digits out of his arse.

So we have Dec '09, Dec '10, and Jan '11. All three times at least one of us..if not both of us told him to strap on his ass-less snowpants because he's be ok in the snowfall dept.

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Yes, very marginal setup on a coastal that was getting squashed a bit to the south:

pnsPlot.JAN2-3_2006.plt.png

Man that gradient from the CT River Valley to the immediate East Slope of the Berks is absolutely sick. 3-4" in the CT valley and 10-18" a few miles east into the hills. That upslope enhancement is pretty crazy because even some high elevation spots along the NY/MA border (west of the crest) don't have impressive totals at all. Then you can see the upslope again into the Catskills with 10"+ amounts showing back up. Its also evident in the ORH hills but not quite as drastic.

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Man that gradient from the CT River Valley to the immediate East Slope of the Berks is absolutely sick. 3-4" in the CT valley and 10-18" a few miles east into the hills. That upslope enhancement is pretty crazy because even some high elevation spots along the NY/MA border (west of the crest) don't have impressive totals at all. Then you can see the upslope again into the Catskills with 10"+ amounts showing back up. Its also evident in the ORH hills but not quite as drastic.

I'm not sure how much upslope was in that storm...IIRC the winds were pretty light, but there might have been a little bit of upslope. Most the differences in accumulation were probably due to elevation because the boundary layer was so marginal. There was also a massive cutoff in qpf just N of ORH. I remember driving up through Holden and by the time I got just 5-7 miles north, the snowfall was like half of what I had.

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Hey I like that storm...I was just pissed at being in Ithaca for it, lol. But ORH got 18.5" out of it...what a total tease that was in ITH though. We were forecasted to get 4-8" by BGM that day and we got 0.5" in the form of about 2 mi vis SN- at 31F for about 4 hours...it wasn't cold. BGM upgraded Broome county (their own county in BGM) to a WSW partway through it and they finished with like 3"...it was the worst upgrade I ever saw in the middle of an event. lol.

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Hey I like that storm...I was just pissed at being in Ithaca for it, lol. But ORH got 18.5" out of it...what a total tease that was in ITH though. We were forecasted to get 4-8" by BGM that day and we got 0.5" in the form of about 2 mi vis SN- at 31F for about 4 hours...it wasn't cold. BGM upgraded Broome county (their own county in BGM) to a WSW partway through it and they finished with like 3"...it was the worst upgrade I ever saw in the middle of an event. lol.

Probably the quickest onset of S+ I've ever seen.

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Ekster only loves that storm because he was in Springfield, MA (or near them) and I was boned in ITH. If we were both at our respective hometowns at the time, he wouldn't even mention it. :lol:

But he also got lucky too being in Norwood, MA near the Newton/Wellesley border in 12/9/05...about the best spot possible to see 5 inches per hour for like 90-120 minutes along with constant thunder snow for that time too. Talk about a horseshoe up yer azz for visiting SNE on storm dates.

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Ekster only loves that storm because he was in Springfield, MA (or near them) and I was boned in ITH. If we were both at our respective hometowns at the time, he wouldn't even mention it. :lol:

yeah well, 4"/hr rates with rediculous thundersnow will do that to you.

But he also got lucky too being in Norwood, MA near the Newton/Wellesley border in 12/9/05...about the best spot possible to see 5 inches per hour for like 90-120 minutes. Talk about a horseshoe up yer azz for visiting SNE on storm dates.

yeah, was supposed to be at the 'ol friday evening wedding. missed the wedding, made it to the reception (which is what counts, no?). I always smile when I drive past the sheraton in Needham on 128...and always will. What a crazy day that was. That level of thundersnow will never be matched again. I like to call that event "the december MCS with snow".

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yeah well, 4"/hr rates with rediculous thundersnow will do that to you...especially when you're not supposed to be there.

yeah, was supposed to be at the 'ol friday evening wedding. missed the wedding, made it to the reception (which is what counts, no?). I always smile when I drive past the sheraton in Needham on 128...and always will. What a crazy day that was.

I briefly lived near the radio towers in Newton, MA for about 3 months (i think the towers are officially in Norwood and owned by channel 5 WCVB) but I always will remember that storm as the "Radio tower storm" in my head because you told me how close you were to there and how there was almost non-stop thunder snow for a 30 minute period which matches the obs that were in the eastern threads back in their early days.

But I know you love to rub those storms in to me as a good prescription to the Feb 23-24, 2010 storm where you were dying to get some decent snow. Even on a lesser extent, the Feb 22-23, 2007 screwjob you got in that norlun. You get me back with 12/9/05 and especially 2/5/01.

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I briefly lived near the radio towers in Newton, MA for about 3 months (i think the towers are officially in Norwood and owned by channel 5 WCVB) but I always will remember that storm as the "Radio tower storm" in my head because you told me how close you were to there and how there was almost non-stop thunder snow for a 30 minute period which matches the obs that were in the eastern threads back in their early days.

yeah, the most memorable vision engrained in my head from that day was some dude outside my hotel room window trying to clean off his car with lightning all over the place. what an idiot. like that guy was going to get anywhere in the middle of that. I remember him looking up at the sky in the direction of the tv towers after a close lightning strike and probably thinking he was next. Those are WFXT towers directly behind the hotel.

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yeah, the most memorable vision engrained in my head from that day was some dude outside my hotel room window trying to clean off his car with lightning all over the place. what an idiot. like that guy was going to get anywhere in the middle of that. I remember him looking up at the sky in the direction of the tv towers after a close lightning strike and probably thinking he was next.

12/9/05 is still probably my best forecast only because I had a boss back then....where he questioned my forecast and a lot of people were counting on that forecast. I went 6-10 with 12"+ lollis and it ended up being conservative. I had upped it from 4-7". My 2nd best forecast is def Feb 23-24, 2010 with the TV guys forecasting about 25% of what I was and busted TOO LOW. 8-13" was too low for ORH and northern towns where Princeton got 17.5". ORH was ok with around 11" but all the northern towns were over 13". TV was forecasting 2-4 or 3-6 with one station going 5-10" but it was constricted to extreme N ORH county near Winchendon, Ashburnham, and Gardner.

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