January Mid/Long Range Disco 3: The great recovery or shut the blinds?

[WinterWxLuvr]

1 hour ago, Ji said:

1 hour ago, Weather Will said:

Seemed like the 0Z GEFS took a step back and really shortened the window of opportunity, but maybe I over reacted.

We're likely to get zero snow from Jan 22 to when it warms up again

Professional help is available 

[AtlanticWx]

i think the window of opportunity remains the same regardless if we pop an se ridge past the 28th like some ensembles are showing

it's quite a weak ridge so idt it'll be able to flush out the really cold 850s from the previous airmass, we'll be fine

[Terpeast]

My thoughts today:

- Jan 23 was never really in play for us

- Before we get invested in a threat, question is how cold do we get and how long does the colder airmass last?

- Not convinced this isn’t another headfake or can kick yet…

[dallen7908]

In at least one metric, the 00 UT EPS run wasn't that much worse than yesterday's encouraging 12 UT run.  

Metric: Percent of EPS members giving College Park at least 4" of snow (10:1 rule) during the following 15 days. 

00 UT Jan 15th run: 9.8%

12 UT Jan 15th run: 17.6%

00 UT Jan 16th run: 21.6%

12 UT Jan 16th run 17.6%

00UT Jan 17th run 21.6%

12 UT Jan 17th run 35.3%

00 UT Jan 18th run 33.3%

[Ralph Wiggum]

17 minutes ago, Terpeast said:

My thoughts today:

- Jan 23 was never really in play for us

- Before we get invested in a threat, question is how cold do we get and how long does the colder airmass last?

- Not convinced this isn’t another headfake or can kick yet…

CMC says let's overwhelm the pattern with avocado cold....LR dry

GFS says let's open the window just a crack then slam it shut so hard it shatters the glass...LR torch

Euro says I'll just string you along a few days then pull the rug out....then when you are out I'll pop a unicorn look and do it again

Sometime I seriously loathe this hobby.

[psuhoffman]

After a couple days of encouraging trends last nights eps and gefs were a step in the wrong direction. Too soon to know if it’s the start of yet another rug pull or just noise since the changes were within normal random wobbles at that range. But the next 24 hours will let us know since we’re getting right to that magic day 7 range for the  most significant changes. 
 

I think either way we will have a more workable pattern for a bit but our problem is in a progressive wave pattern it’s going to often take multiple chances to get a hit. Even in the better looks of yesterdays 12z runs the odds of a hit on any one specific wave is never going to be high. They fly along the boundary as it shifts north and south. Some waves will get suppressed. Some will be too amplified and go north. It will likely take several waves in that kind of pattern to get a flush hit. So if it ends up being only a 5 day period before the trough pulls west and the SE ridge goes ape again we’re likely to get shut out again unless we get very lucky. We need this kind of pattern to be more sustained to work.  If this was a more classic coastal storm type pattern we could work with a single shot type deal but those kind of setups haven’t been cold enough to work. These wave patterns are more likely to be colder but less likely for any individual wave to track right. 

[WinterWxLuvr]

I see people reference the word “hobby” a lot here as if their interest is tracking and following weather. If that were true, tracking warmth would be as exciting as tracking cold or snow. For some that might be the truth but for most we do this just in the hope that it will snow.

[AtlanticWx]

damn

[psuhoffman]

6 minutes ago, WinterWxLuvr said:

I see people reference the word “hobby” a lot here as if their interest is tracking and following weather. If that were true, tracking warmth would be as exciting as tracking cold or snow. For some that might be the truth but for most we do this just in the hope that it will snow.

This is probably true of many but I do track heat waves, tropical, severe.  Snow is the holy grail though for me simply because the payoff is better. 

[Terpeast]

10 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

After a couple days of encouraging trends last nights eps and gefs were a step in the wrong direction. Too soon to know if it’s the start of yet another rug pull or just noise since the changes were within normal random wobbles at that range. But the next 24 hours will let us know since we’re getting right to that magic day 7 range for the  most significant changes. 
 

I think either way we will have a more workable pattern for a bit but our problem is in a progressive wave pattern it’s going to often take multiple chances to get a hit. Even in the better looks of yesterdays 12z runs the odds of a hit on any one specific wave is never going to be high. They fly along the boundary as it shifts north and south. Some waves will get suppressed. Some will be too amplified and go north. It will likely take several waves in that kind of pattern to get a flush hit. So if it ends up being only a 5 day period before the trough pulls west and the SE ridge goes ape again we’re likely to get shut out again unless we get very lucky. We need this kind of pattern to be more sustained to work.  If this was a more classic coastal storm type pattern we could work with a single shot type deal but those kind of setups haven’t been cold enough to work. These wave patterns are more likely to be colder but less likely for any individual wave to track right. 

Good post. I agree, and was thinking similarly in that if our window is only 5 days, that’s not good enough. We need a good 2 week window of cold (doesn’t have to be arctic) with multiple waves. One might hit. But there has to be plenty of time for that to happen. 

[midatlanticweather]

9 minutes ago, WinterWxLuvr said:

I see people reference the word “hobby” a lot here as if their interest is tracking and following weather. If that were true, tracking warmth would be as exciting as tracking cold or snow. For some that might be the truth but for most we do this just in the hope that it will snow.

I am a tracker of all weather, but snow is my favorite! So ya, I will track it more as part of my hobby fun, and closer than any other weather

 

[Maestrobjwa]

Am I being too simplistic I'm just looking at the status of tbd SE ridge? I mean for me I'm encouraged that we haven't seen any resurgence in the long range models (at least not to hr 384, lol). I mean since that's been our biggest issue this winter...but someone could enlighten me.

Edit: Yeah I see it tried to flex again at the end of the 0z eps run...

[Chris78]

Last nights cmc and 06z gfs both give us some snow next Wednesday.

Gfs is a better track compared to the  cmc whick is west but we get some front end.

7 days out. 2 of the major models showing digital blue in the same time frame. I'll take it.

Now watch the 12z runs show a damn cutter and while we are in the 60s. 

[psuhoffman]

24 minutes ago, Terpeast said:

Good post. I agree, and was thinking similarly in that if our window is only 5 days, that’s not good enough. We need a good 2 week window of cold (doesn’t have to be arctic) with multiple waves. One might hit. But there has to be plenty of time for that to happen. 

We're on the same page, unfortunately its often a shitty page.  That's why I made that post a while back about rooting for the look that was more likely to be sustainable rather than simple "what puts the most blue over us".  This is another reason why I just can't bring myself to root for a pacific driven wave pattern.  Ya I know lately we've had temperature problems with atlantic driven patters...but there is a reason that historically the AO/NAO is the most correlated driver to our snow NOT the EPO or even PNA.  We might win sometimes with these waves...but its gonna be REALLY hard to ever have a truly snowy winter on the whole that way.  2014 was pretty much the only example where a big winter came about that way and it took a crazy favorable Pacific to lock in wall to wall all winter from November to April.  People forget there were plenty of misses in there also, a couple waves in Dec went north, a wave in Jan south, late Jan early Feb some misses north...its just the pattern was stable so freaking long we also got a lot of hits.   

I know some throw 2015 in there but the way the TPV got displaced into southeast canada acted as a defacto NAO block by causing confluence to our northeast in the same way.  

If I lived on the coastal plain and and I was just rooting to get lucky a couple times a winter and to get 15" of snow was a good result....yea then I would want this.  But anywhere west of the fall line...this just isn't mathematically likely to result in a win on a seasonal level.  We saw that last year...the warm anomalies were so warm (as usual) that is skewed the whole season, but we were in a cold pattern for a big part of the season and had a lot of chances with these waves...and still most of the region ended up below avg snowfall!  It's really hard for us to have a big snowfall season around here without hitting on a more classic coastal storm or two.  It's down right impossible if all we get are short windows to try to luck into these progressive waves.  

[peribonca]

https://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate-gardens/ice/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=content_estate&fbclid=IwAR0l89oS5QOXsY4-KKH-M25jLwcnqmJDwt_UuSqld7EJLCjudzrruXutVP4&mibextid=Zxz2cZ

[Ralph Wiggum]

36 minutes ago, WinterWxLuvr said:

I see people reference the word “hobby” a lot here as if their interest is tracking and following weather. If that were true, tracking warmth would be as exciting as tracking cold or snow. For some that might be the truth but for most we do this just in the hope that it will snow.

Tracking wintry weather is a hobby for me. I'm not on here as much during the summer outside of following severe or a tropical system,  but 'hobby' is still an acceptable term for what many of us do here outside of red taggers and orange taggers.

[psuhoffman]

17 minutes ago, Maestrobjwa said:

Am I being too simplistic I'm just looking at the status of tbd SE ridge? I mean for me I'm encouraged that we haven't seen any resurgence in the long range models (at least not to hr 384, lol). I mean since that's been our biggest issue this winter...but someone could enlighten me.

Edit: Yeah I see it tried to flex again at the end of the 0z eps run...

It also is flexing more on the 6z GEFS.  We will see today...I really think todays 12 and 0z runs are BIG because we are right about the range where the rug was pulled on all the past pattern changes.  If it's going to happen again we probably see continued degradation today and then we know its over.  If things swing back in a positive way today maybe we have a chance at a meaningful pattern change.  But be careful seeing the "good look" around day 10.  It means absolutely nothing unless it lasts more than just a few days.  The "good look" you see day 10ish is behind a wave...but if it only lasts a few days then warms up before the next wave that does us no good.  Cold dry warm wet.  We need the cold to settle in for weeks for us to get a hit in this kind of pattern.  If we only get cold behind waves and warm up before the next we won't get any snow.  

[psuhoffman]

37 minutes ago, AtlanticWx said:

damn

Those probabilities have a major mathematical flaw.  They are simply showing what % of the EPS members show X amount of snow.  But those permutations are all based on the same physical equation so they all have the same bias and errors to some degree.  The model is unable to calculate what the true odds of snow are  because it does not know what it does not know, and that is what is the chance the EPS physics is handling something incorrectly and it has nothing to do with the permutations of the initial conditions.   A probabilities based on the ensembles of the GEFS/GEPS/EPS might produce a slightly better true probabilities.  It would help if those others put more emphasis on their ensembles like the ECMWF does but at least it would calculate some different physics representations into the equation.  

[psuhoffman]

14 minutes ago, peribonca said:

https://www.mountvernon.org/the-estate-gardens/ice/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=content_estate&fbclid=IwAR0l89oS5QOXsY4-KKH-M25jLwcnqmJDwt_UuSqld7EJLCjudzrruXutVP4&mibextid=Zxz2cZ

BAIT

[paulythegun]

 

This looks promising!

[Terpeast]

2 minutes ago, paulythegun said:

 

This looks promising!

I see what you did there...

[wasnow215]

1 hour ago, WinterWxLuvr said:

I see people reference the word “hobby” a lot here as if their interest is tracking and following weather. If that were true, tracking warmth would be as exciting as tracking cold or snow. For some that might be the truth but for most we do this just in the hope that it will snow.

Total respect and totally understand your point, but if you compare it with fantasy football as a hobby, you could say as a hobbyist we participate consistently but can lose interest when “your team is out of it” and other things in our lives take precedence. Same with tracking as a hobby IMO.

[AtlanticWx]

it seems increasingly likely we'll probably get some decent cold and this pattern looks good for ski resorts in PA, hopefully the ski season redeems itself for places like whitetail n liberty

[Ravens94]

Icon looks better through 96

[Ravens94]

[Ravens94]

Boom

[Paleocene]

3 minutes ago, Ravens94 said:

 

we like ike

edit: ninja'd

 

 

[WxUSAF]

Kaiser starts off 12z well. Key to a coastal track seems to be a more northern stream dominated shortwave as 6z gfs and 12z icon show.

[clskinsfan]

ICON pummels us out west. Lock it in. 

 

[BristowWx]

1 minute ago, Paleocene said:

we like ike

edit: ninja'd

 

 

I'd sign for that.  shame to think 5 days out is way too long to get excited regardless of the model.  might at well be 15 days out