Tracking either the biggest storm to affect at a regional scale since perhaps 2013 ... or, a complete whiff. Pick-em'

[UnitedWx]

3 hours ago, ineedsnow said:

Nothing really on the GFS in terms of snowfall.  Just fast forward to spring and get it done with.. 

Give it a few hours. Calculations will be put through the food processor and it will spit out a totally different solution

[WinterWolf]

4 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

NAM def trending signficiantly deeper with the northern stream while dragging the southern vort more....just like it's daddy, the Euro.

Let’s get us a couple inches Saturday afternoon…nothing wrong with that…the big dog was a mirage, was all just fantasy and never met to be.  

[OceanStWx]

20 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

That's very hard to do in February. Average highs are well into the low 40s by the end of the month in Boston. So to have over half of the days below 32F for a high is really putting up some cold anomalies.

In an era when our "cold" months are like -1.0 below normal, February 2015 was -12.8 at BOS. 

[UnitedWx]

Just now, OceanStWx said:

In an era when our "cold" months are like -1.0 below normal, February 2015 was -12.8 at BOS. 

Yes. Aside from the wind chill, it isn't abnormally cold at all. Just kinda normal minus much snow... yet

[weathafella]

1 minute ago, UnitedWx said:

Yes. Aside from the wind chill, it isn't abnormally cold at all. Just kinda normal minus much snow... yet

It’s probably -3 though.  Normally cold as Don Kent used to say.

[Cyclone-68]

3 minutes ago, weathafella said:

It’s probably -3 though.  Normally cold as Don Kent used to say.

I used to like how he would describe strong thunderstorms “with squally winds” on the radio. Never hear that phrase anymore 

[eduggs]

1 hour ago, ariof said:

BOS got more snow that month than any other city of its size (4 million plus), ever, in history. Sapporo gets more but it's smaller.

BOS also had its second-coldest month on record (behind just Feb 1934), second-coldest low max (39, behind 36 in Jan 1875), 43 days below 40 (second place 38), 15 days below freezing (second place, 16, 1961) and 28 days with a low below 20 (second place: 23).

It was basically normal temps for Minneapolis, except with way more snow. It's also when I went walking on the Charles and people were afraid I pointed out that it is basically a lake and Minneapolis spends its entire winter on frozen lakes. (Also, when people said "but combined sewer outfall" I asked when it had rained or melted enough.)

What was even more wild is how easy the melt was. Just a bunch of dry, warm days, very little rain until late March (one earlier storm in the 30s meant the snowpack mostly absorbed it) and no flooding. Just imagine what a warm March rainstorm with 3" of precip would have done! (I remember some worry about this.)

I think the Charles melted out in early April after three solid months. Almost definitely the longest stretch of ice cover.

FWIW, Sapporo is a bigger city than Boston. Obviously metro sizes depend on where you draw the borders, but Sapporo also feels significantly bigger than Boston. And although it isn't particularly snowy compared to the immediate surrounding area, it has received significantly more snow during many months than BOS did that winter. But Japan is kind of in a category of its own.

[tamarack]

43 minutes ago, WinterWolf said:

So in 2015, Boston was in 3 rd place for days below freezing with 15 days? Because 1961 had 16 days below freezing and that was 2nd place?  Am I understanding that correct? Because Thats what you have written down. 

I think that's consecutive days.  In 1961, NYC stayed below 32 from Jan 20 thru Feb 3, 16 days in which the high was 29 and the low -2.  Also, though the punctuation is ambiguous, the 15 days in 2015 may be the 2nd place run; 1961 being tops (as it is at Central Park).

[DavisStraight]

1 minute ago, eduggs said:

FWIW, Sapporo is a bigger city than Boston. And although it isn't particularly snowy compared to the immediate surrounding area, it has received significantly more snow during many months than BOS did that winter. But Japan is kind of in a category of its own.

They have a strange snow climate where it doesn't get frigid but cold enough to snow, a lot.

[ma blizzard]

1 minute ago, DavisStraight said:

They have a strange snow climate where it doesn't get frigid but cold enough to snow, a lot.

must be nice to get massive ocean effect snow with Siberia next door 

[WxWatcher007]

31 minutes ago, WinterWolf said:

Lol, my point was that the euro supposedly just did so well in the medium, now we are questioning it in the short term?  It should nail this at 3 days out easily. 

 

28 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

NAM def trending signficiantly deeper with the northern stream while dragging the southern vort more....just like it's daddy, the Euro.

lol I’m so jaded. My very first thought when reading this was “And it can go straight to hell just like its daddy”.

 

22 minutes ago, WinterWolf said:

Let’s get us a couple inches Saturday afternoon…nothing wrong with that…the big dog was a mirage, was all just fantasy and never met to be.  

All joking and emotion aside, I disagree here. I think the setup was as good as we could legitimately have, and while it turned out to fail, it was real at some point.

That’s why I’m on the cusp of pulling the plug on it all. If we want anywhere close to normal, we can’t expect 1-2” events every ten days to two weeks to get us there. And assume February will just be fine. It’ll look nice and I won’t poo poo snow, but it’s objectively bad to have DC, Dallas, and maybe even Atlanta surpassing my seasonal total at any time, let alone in mid-January. 

[eduggs]

1 minute ago, DavisStraight said:

They have a strange snow climate where it doesn't get frigid but cold enough to snow, a lot.

Sapporo City gets very cold and frequently frigid. But the city itself is warmed by the Sea of Japan on NW winds, so it's a bit warmer than inland/mountainous areas. Overall, Hokkaido is colder than SNE.

[CoastalWx]

Boston only had 6 days in Feb where the high was above 32 in 2015 lol.

[WxWatcher007]

4 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Boston only had 6 days in Feb where the high was above 32 in 2015 lol.

That’s incredible 

[Damage In Tolland]

28 minutes ago, WinterWolf said:

Let’s get us a couple inches Saturday afternoon…nothing wrong with that…the big dog was a mirage, was all just fantasy and never met to be.  

Would start pre dawn 

[DavisStraight]

12 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Boston only had 6 days in Feb where the high was above 32 in 2015 lol.

Dream month, I wore boots for 5 weeks straight when I went out. Also had snow shoes in my back seat.

[cleetussnow]

24 minutes ago, eduggs said:

Sapporo City gets very cold and frequently frigid. But the city itself is warmed by the Sea of Japan on NW winds, so it's a bit warmer than inland/mountainous areas. Overall, Hokkaido is colder than SNE.

Japan has latitude, a cold air source, and can whip up a moisture feed since it's an island.  Siberia is like our Canada, only colder.  Some of the urban snow pictures are incredible.  Even Tokyo can get whacked - and I think it did like 5 or 6 years ago.

[UnitedWx]

28 minutes ago, WxWatcher007 said:

 

lol I’m so jaded. My very first thought when reading this was “And it can go straight to hell just like its daddy”.

 

All joking and emotion aside, I disagree here. I think the setup was as good as we could legitimately have, and while it turned out to fail, it was real at some point.

That’s why I’m on the cusp of pulling the plug on it all. If we want anywhere close to normal, we can’t expect 1-2” events every ten days to two weeks to get us there. And assume February will just be fine. It’ll look nice and I won’t poo poo snow, but it’s objectively bad to have DC, Dallas, and maybe even Atlanta surpassing my seasonal total at any time, let alone in mid-January. 

Interesting perspective, but it definitely was not real at some point. That's the problem with forecasting the future you just don't know. If this storm doesn't happen as a blockbuster, then it was never going to happen that way. It's not like the models decided to change something it's the fact that they didn't know something or thought they knew something and were in error., it just wasn't meant to happen that way. It's like making assumptions in life a lot of times you get burned. Same thing with the weather computers. Lots of what they compute up to a point is based on assumptions

[WxWatcher007]

1 minute ago, UnitedWx said:

Interesting perspective, but it definitely was not real at some point. That's the problem with forecasting the future you just don't know. If this storm doesn't happen as a blockbuster, then it was never going to happen that way. It's not like the models decided to change something it's the fact that they didn't know something or thought they knew something and were in error., it just wasn't meant to happen that way. It's like making assumptions in life a lot of times you get burned. Same thing with the weather computers. Lots of what they compute up to a point is based on assumptions

Yeah—I think the point that I’ve tried to make around here, especially going back to my days living in the DC area, is that the models while extraordinarily powerful and useful have a limitation to their reliability. They’re tools, not prophets. They don’t make it snow and they don’t have the ability to take it away. 

I do think at some point the big dog threat became less likely, obviously, but I don’t view weather as “meant to be” regardless of the outcome.

The best way that I can articulate this I think is with tropical. You have a hurricane. It’s clearly in an environment that’s favorable for explosive intensification. It’s intensifying. The observed conditions suggest that it could continue taking off—and some do while others don’t. The potential is real whether or not the ingredients come together at the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.

With this system, we all knew the potential was there. It just wasn’t realized. That doesn’t make the potential any less real to me. Hopefully that makes sense. 

[ariof]

1 hour ago, weathafella said:

A city of 4 million?  Boston city is about 700,000.   May be 4m in the entire metro but even that is dwarfed by many.

Metro populations here. Depending on how you count, Boston is 5-8 million (MSA vs CSA), Sapporo is 2.6m.

[78Blizzard]

If we go back before New Years Day, all the model ensembles said the same thing.  Cold and dry for the next 2 weeks. They were right. 

For this specific so-called threat, the one model that never strayed from that cold and dry scenario for even one run was the UK.

[ORH_wxman]

10 minutes ago, UnitedWx said:

Interesting perspective, but it definitely was not real at some point. That's the problem with forecasting the future you just don't know. If this storm doesn't happen as a blockbuster, then it was never going to happen that way. It's not like the models decided to change something it's the fact that they didn't know something or thought they knew something and were in error., it just wasn't meant to happen that way. It's like making assumptions in life a lot of times you get burned. Same thing with the weather computers. Lots of what they compute up to a point is based on assumptions

This is more of a semantics argument. I think Don is really just saying “this behaved a lot like other storms on model guidance that would easily hit us at D6-7”….you see some actual hits in the Op runs plus a bunch of close calls and the ones that weren’t hitting us were trending in a good direction until they weren’t. But there was a time where it looked very realistic. 
 

It wasn’t a clown range fantasy or something like the GGEM continuously showing the storm at D5-7 but no other guidance agreeing with it. It behaved like many systems that would hit us. But that’s part of the challenge in this field….we aren’t smart enough to calculate millions of perturbations in the atmosphere…otherwise we wouldn’t need model guidance. 

[UnitedWx]

3 minutes ago, WxWatcher007 said:

Yeah—I think the point that I’ve tried to make around here, especially going back to my days living in the DC area, is that the models while extraordinarily powerful and useful have a limitation to their reliability. They’re tools, not prophets. They don’t make it snow and they don’t have the ability to take it away. 

I do think at some point the big dog threat became less likely, obviously, but I don’t view weather as “meant to be” regardless of the outcome.

The best way that I can articulate this I think is with tropical. You have a hurricane. It’s clearly in an environment that’s favorable for explosive intensification. It’s intensifying. The observed conditions suggest that it could continue taking off—and some do while others don’t. The potential is real whether or not the ingredients come together at the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.

With this system, we all knew the potential was there. It just wasn’t realized. That doesn’t make the potential any less real to me. Hopefully that makes sense. 

Yes that makes more sense to me. You're right many times you have the players on the field, they're just a little bit out of position and it ruins everything

[UnitedWx]

Just now, ORH_wxman said:

This is more of a semantics argument. I think Don is really just saying “this behaved a lot like other storms on model guidance that would easily hit us at D6-7”….you see some actual hits in the Op runs plus a bunch of close calls and the ones that weren’t hitting us were trending in a good direction until they weren’t. But there was a time where it looked very realistic. 
 

It wasn’t a clown range fantasy or something like the GGEM continuously showing the storm at D5-7 but no other guidance agreeing with it. It behaved like many systems that would hit us. But that’s part of the challenge in this field….we aren’t smart enough to calculate millions of perturbations in the atmosphere…otherwise we wouldn’t need model guidance. 

I think the big head fake for some was the euro actually showing it for a run or two and then yanking it back. And I'll tell you I've been hating on the Euro the last few years compared to previous but it seems to be performing much better so far this winter then the recent past. I guess I'll actually have to look at it lol, but I'm not staying up past midnight to do so!

[UnitedWx]

And the funny thing is I just looked at the latest Euro and to me it looks the best it has for extreme Southern New England in the past several days. To my highly untrained eyes it actually looks better than the GFS from this morning. NOT saying it shows much however 

[Mr. Windcredible!]

1 hour ago, WinterWolf said:

Let’s get us a couple inches Saturday afternoon…nothing wrong with that…the big dog was a mirage, was all just fantasy and never met to be.  

I will literally take anything measurable at this point. Going on 3 years since I've had a snowfall of 4" or more (1/29/22 was the last for me). This has been the most miserable stretch I've seen in the 18 years I've been here. Monday's little surprise felt like a blizzard for those few hours.

[78Blizzard]

1 minute ago, UnitedWx said:

And the funny thing is I just looked at the latest Euro and to me it looks the best it has for extreme Southern New England in the past several days. To my highly untrained eyes it actually looks better than the GFS from this morning. NOT saying it shows much however 

All of whatever falls is coming from the northern stream, not the southern one.

[WxWatcher007]

1 minute ago, ORH_wxman said:

This is more of a semantics argument. I think Don is really just saying “this behaved a lot like other storms on model guidance that would easily hit us at D6-7”….you see some actual hits in the Op runs plus a bunch of close calls and the ones that weren’t hitting us were trending in a good direction until they weren’t. But there was a time where it looked very realistic. 
 

It wasn’t a clown range fantasy or something like the GGEM continuously showing the storm at D5-7 but no other guidance agreeing with it. It behaved like many systems that would hit us. But that’s part of the challenge in this field….we aren’t smart enough to calculate millions of perturbations in the atmosphere…otherwise we wouldn’t need model guidance. 

 

1 minute ago, UnitedWx said:

Yes that makes more sense to me. You're right many times you have the players on the field, they're just a little bit out of position and it ruins everything

And that’s what fascinates me. There is this element of unpredictability that occurs on both a mesoscale and synoptic level that has an enormous impact on people and the environment. It’s the EF5 that destroys a house and spares another. It’s the snow/mix line that gives one part of town 6” of snow and a place a few miles away half that. It’s being 20 miles from the eye of a hurricane and watching it wobble as landfall approaches. It’s watching a window for a blizzard open and close. There is so much to consider. 
 

 

[UnitedWx]

Just now, WxWatcher007 said:

 

It’s the snow/mix line that gives one part of town 6” of snow and a place a few miles away half that. 
 

 

Oh absolutely! Just don't let Coastal WX see the sentence I highlighted. He was ready to ring my neck while I was arguing this last night

[JC-CT]

1 minute ago, WxWatcher007 said:

 

And that’s what fascinates me. There is this element of unpredictability that occurs on both a mesoscale and synoptic level that has an enormous impact on people and the environment. It’s the EF5 that destroys a house and spares another. It’s the snow/mix line that gives one part of town 6” of snow and a place a few miles away half that. It’s being 20 miles from the eye of a hurricane and watching it wobble as landfall approaches. It’s watching a window for a blizzard open and close. There is so much to consider. 
 

 

It's the difference between C and 1.5"!