February 2023 Obs/Discussion

[jbenedet]

4 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

I've been noticing this for years, actually.

I don't look at any MOS or 2-meter T products anymore, as my ability to quick calc the adiabat and adding some perfunctory ( CC ?) five. That does vastly superior to any of those machine interpolations.

It's weird that all modeling technology, despite any source ... is low on 2-m, always.  I don't believe - seriously - that's CC.. I think there's a systemic problem in mixing/BL handling.  It's hard to know for certain what drives that.  It's also typically worse from roughly now through early August... every year.

It's peculiar for sure. It's like the climo surface cold tucks we get are being over-modeled at every opportunity this year, and by a large margin.

[Baroclinic Zone]

5 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

I want to think that Sunday or Monday tries for us. I want to believe lol. But, 2022-2023.

 

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

6 minutes ago, jbenedet said:

Nah man. Just calling a spade a spade.

Literally a ratter is N to BN when there are no storm threats, and AN when there are storms. That is it. Don't make it complicated.

That’s not it.

[Typhoon Tip]

7 minutes ago, jbenedet said:

It's peculiar for sure. It's like the climo surface cold tucks we get are being over-modeled at every opportunity this year, and by a large margin.

Save for the 18 hour arctic headline event... Seems that was pretty well nailed down, though the GFS - if anything - was too warm until maybe 3 cycles before the invasion swept through.

Otherwise, yup ...  I remember a couple of BDs last year that ended up milder like that ...not hugely so, but 2 or 3F ... I was thinking then that it's getting a little weird that both sides of boundaries exhibit the similar error behavior - if not so much by scalar magnitude therein. 

anyway yeah.  Folks should should just protocol a 2 F add-on as an auto adjust. LOL and go up from there.

[mahk_webstah]

Just did some measuring on my morning walk. Still a solid 8 to 13 inches in the open areas and fields. In the woods anywhere from 12 to maybe 16 or 17. This is an incredibly resilient snow pack during a time that’s not that cold. I don’t know the physical processes, but it just seems like the pack is slowly reduced, but gotten very compacted solid. Will take a good bit of rain, sun, wind, and high dewpoint nights to get rid of stuff. Still hope for you, Scott.  The words are absolute magic right now.

[Sey-Mour Snow]

22 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

I want to think that Sunday or Monday tries for us. I want to believe lol. But, 2022-2023.

Ya we are def jaded this season. Bc there should be some more hope for that one, it at least has a chance to turn more favorable and give some their first plowable. 

[snowman19]

Everyone starting to hype up the strat warming event .
Maybe a wild March just like 2018?

The only ones hyping it up are Joe Bastardi and Mark Margavage. This is nothing like 2018, they are wishcasting again

[ORH_wxman]

16 minutes ago, RUNNAWAYICEBERG said:

That’s not it.

Eh dont bother…he’s not going to engage fully. Everyone else knew what you were saying…rats come in different flavors and this one is a really weird one. We’ve had some decent pattern windows and we’ve whiffed on all of them. It’s different than a rat like 2001-2002 or 2011-2012 where we went almost wire to wire with a fat pig over Alaska and very little hope. 

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

Just now, Sey-Mour Snow said:

Ya we are def jaded this season. Bc there should be some more hope for that one, it at least has a chance to turn more favorable and give some their first plowable. 

Some of us are still tracking but we get berated for looking at systems in a vacuum. Instead, we should chug a bottle of anger and depression…and jump into the mass grave. 

[Typhoon Tip]

numerical PNA from the GEFs basis is trying to rise in last night's computation, perhaps picking up on limiting warm up pattern length.  We'll see if that has legs.  

The spatial interpretation still illustrates a PV situated on our side of the hemisphere, with N-NE Pac occasional ridge presentation - not hugely amplified, nor deeply anomalously cold over the Canadian shield ( geopotential heights) but if that is true (in the EPS and GEPs as well )  doesn't exactly lend to warmth.   

[CoastalWx]

9 minutes ago, snowman19 said:

The only ones hyping it up are Joe Bastardi and Mark Margavage. This is nothing like 2018, they are wishcasting again

The calls for SSWs and their impacts makes 98% of mets who talk about it, look like complete fools. STFU if you don't know what you're talking about. 

[512high]

4 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

The calls for SSWs and their impacts makes 98% of mets who talk about it, look like complete fools. STFU if you don't know what you're talking about. 

Hey Scott/others: GYX has me for a weather advisory later tonight, just wondering if I should pre-salt a few lots later this eve. looks very quick with not much precip? 

[CoastalWx]

9 minutes ago, 512high said:

Hey Scott/others: GYX has me for a weather advisory later tonight, just wondering if I should pre-salt a few lots later this eve. looks very quick with not much precip? 

I could see it getting a little slippery with mixed precip. Probably would not hurt to pre treat.

[HIPPYVALLEY]

GFS and Canadian look like perpetual November continues in SNE.  Not much frozen precipitation and not really any big warm ups.

Clouds, occasional sunny days and upper 30's to low 40's from W to E for highs.  Coast warmer but still blah.

[DavisStraight]

38 minutes ago, Sey-Mour Snow said:

Ya we are def jaded this season. Bc there should be some more hope for that one, it at least has a chance to turn more favorable and give some their first plowable. 

I just want to use my snowblower at least once this year.

[Spanks45]

9 minutes ago, DavisStraight said:

I just want to use my snowblower at least once this year.

I just want to use my shovel at least once this year.....

[Typhoon Tip]

21 minutes ago, DavisStraight said:

I just want to use my snowblower at least once this year.

There's a landscape machinery repair and sales type outfit here in town, and you drive by there and there's rows of neglected snow blowers, sparkly as though wearing their best clothes ...standing in wait on adoption day at the local orphanage. Putting their best behavior foot forward they're smiles in waste.  

They were born into this world in haste, but now ...for most of them ... they'll never be a part of a family.

[Cold Miser]

Ratter = shameful excuse for winter.  No one argues it, but I suppose the interpretation is different to the individual.   In my hood it means, I don't think it can get any worse.  I just hope I never experience this again. 
 

 

[brooklynwx99]

1 hour ago, snowman19 said:

The only ones hyping it up are Joe Bastardi and Mark Margavage. This is nothing like 2018, they are wishcasting again

the AO plot that is being posted is through the 20th or so. any impacts from the SSW, if it occurs, would be felt in March, so the tweet is a bit intellectually dishonest. but that's par for the course there

if one is going to use model guidance, it should go out far enough, and the GEFS extended and Weeklies both show a -NAO favored, likely from the SPV disruption/split

[wx2fish]

1 hour ago, jbenedet said:

I was just doing a cursory check of the temp guidance for highs today - AGAIN looks really low vs 850 temps, and no surface CAD and lots of sun until afternoon.

What gives?

33 for a high at PSM ??? 40 seems pretty damn doable. 42 makes more sense to me than 33. 

Problem today is its really inverted aloft. No chance of mixing those 850s 

[snowman19]

Haha... I was just going to say...   well, actually, I was going to say, "the GFS has no interest in a warm up at all" ... In fact, that looks like a steady diet of flat waves capable of snow right through the SE ridge flex.  ...actually it does have a cutter, too.  little hyperbole.
Re the Euro: its precarious synoptics, nearing D10 ( high confidence, I know!), totes an 850 mb continental WCB with 850mb of +13C. The PGF suggests 15-20 kts of tumbling mix, too. I checked the RH fields just for shits and giggles and they're nada on clouds. 700, 500, 300's all Just like to remind, ...we put up mid 80s off 13C at 850, as we went super adiabat - dry air heat late winter into early spring, prior to green up, can mix BL very tall.  That was in 2017.  The point is...it can happen, not claiming any analog.  So ironically, heat has a mechanism for over producing prior to the continental DP sucking kinetic heat.
That said, precarious should be underscored.  The entire Canadian shield is actually -20 or lower at 850 mb, if/when very stupidly using the Euro at this range. And actually ...the gradient between the warm tongue of air described above, and that cold mass near by in Canada, is very steep. 

 
This is like sniffing out a mere warm sector to me ( wrt the Euro...), more so than defining an extended pattern stay.  I mean it seems that way.. That cold lurking by, which is present in GEFs ensemble systems too...  so a smidge of cross guidance support on the gradient idea.., is a mere synoptic giga movement from ending any debate.
Well anyway...  I realize the La Nina climo this, and historic precedence for torching that... yup, all that. But we have to pay attention to metrics too, and a progressive pattern trend with embedded opportunities for amplitude, with so much cold loaded not far away, could also lend to GFS type evolution - even if its perhaps overdoing it.  
The funny thing is... if you took the GFS' 00z snow event around that time, and averaged with the Euros 74 F utopia, what do you get?    The same 42 F cloudy p.o.s. agonizingly uninspired boring winter we've had all along.  Yup...that's my official forecast... piece of shit.  LOL

The 6z GFS honestly looked like a mid-March storm that would be totally rate/dynamic cooling (UVV) dependent

[STILL N OF PIKE]

That arctic blast is so interesting and odd timed to me that the coldest nite in decades occurred in a mild ratter winter for SNE. And by coldest I’m combining temp and winds for the Actual  “feeling” of What it was like outside . Still seems surreal that it produced 

[CoastalWx]

8 minutes ago, wx2fish said:

Problem today is its really inverted aloft. No chance of mixing those 850s 

Yeah 40s up there probably won't happen.

[snowman19]

The 6z GFS honestly looked like a mid-March storm that would be totally rate/dynamic cooling (UVV) dependent

And the 12z winds up a 993mb that misses way to the south, no cold air around

[Sey-Mour Snow]

Congrats Carolinas! 

[ORH_wxman]

11 minutes ago, STILL N OF PIKE said:

That arctic blast is so interesting and odd timed to me that the coldest nite in decades occurred in a mild ratter winter for SNE. And by coldest I’m combining temp and winds for the Actual  “feeling” of What it was like outside . Still seems surreal that it produced 

Well for places like BOS it actually was the coldest in over 65 years. Basically non-radiators haven’t seen colder since then. There were probably some ties though (such as ACK…likely ORH tied the 2016 outbreak too if their ASOS sensor was correct)

[MJO812]

5 minutes ago, snowman19 said:

And the 12z winds up a 993mb that misses way to the south, no cold air around

There is cold air

Stop lying

[ORH_wxman]

19 minutes ago, wx2fish said:

Problem today is its really inverted aloft. No chance of mixing those 850s 

Even just the sfc plot screams “in-situ” CAD…look at how dead the sfc winds are over New England versus out in western NY and PA…not what you want to see for a well-mixed atmosphere 

 

[DJln491]

 Storm on the GFS heading out to search for the titanic.  bon voyage

[40/70 Benchmark]

25 minutes ago, Cold Miser said:

Ratter = shameful excuse for winter.  No one argues it, but I suppose the interpretation is different to the individual.   In my hood it means, I don't think it can get any worse.  I just hope I never experience this again. 
 

 

Problem is that some fail to differentiate the pattern from the result....there is a spectrum of sorts. This year is merely a subpar pattern with a ratter result.