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One last post before I call it a night. Something that I thought was a fun demonstration of how moistening the atmosphere truly works was this snapshot of the HRRR at 2am Friday. I really love how you can see the actual snowfall hitting the ground earliest along the spine of Shenandoah because the couple 1000 feet elevation they have compared to the surrounding areas means that there is less dry air between the clouds and the ground. It's fun to then see this reflected by it showing snow hitting the ground instead of sublimating. Dewpoint depression shows how the higher up you go the more moisture is making it to the surface as the lower values are found almost identically to an elevation map. None of this actually has a sensible impact on our weather or forecasts (though it does explain that the Shenandoah maximum in this storm is less the result of orthographic lift but instead this dry air quirk) but instead just a fun exercise to show how moistening the column works from the top down elevation wise. I will be sure to this run to show my mountain meteorology/climate near the ground professor as I feel that they'd appreciate it.

Surprise inch of fluffy snow ahead of the arctic front. 7.9" season to date. We are nickel and diming away to start 2025-26.

Baby steps!!

It's all good bro.

Kind of a shame to see that nice weekend clipper quickly crap the bed as it enters Iowa. Hopefully the models are too quick to crap it.

0z GEFS 50% stronger signal than 18z

Here is the ring. Anyone want to take a stab at why this formed? Ice crystals?

Yeah, with the addition of this latest round of snow from Winter Storm Chan, I was expecting the ski conditions to take another bump upward. With that in mind, I definitely wanted to get out for some turns to see what this new snow had done, so I headed up to Bolton Valley for a tour this morning. I was a little worried when I saw temperatures in the single digits F as I neared the top of the Bolton Valley Access Road, but I got out of the car in the Village parking lot and found that it was very comfortable. With full sunshine, zero wind, and dry air, it felt like the temperature was in the 20s F. For new snow accumulations, there did seem to be some elevation dependence in the Bolton Valley area. In terms of settled new snow depths this morning, I measured 3-4” at the Timberline Base at 1,500’, and up at 2,000’ in the Village I found roughly 4-5”, similar to what I’d measured for accumulations down at our house in the valley. Those new snow depths definitely increased as one went up toward 3,000’, but it was hard to tell exactly how much snow was new with the powder from previous rounds of snow also sitting atop the old base. The Bolton Valley Snow Report is indicating 5-6” new for today, and that would easily make sense above 2,000’, especially since I was there in the morning after settling. This snow fell light and dry around here, in line with what a lot of folks have been saying. My liquid analyses for Winter Storm Chan down at our site revealed an average snow density of approximately 6% H2O, and that’s a fantastic ratio for powder skiing as long as you have enough of it and its fallen into an appropriately right-side-up snowpack. Thankfully, the accumulations from this storm are bolstered by the accumulations from the past couple of systems, so in areas that haven’t been touched in the past week, I was finding powder depths of around a foot. All you had to do was seek out that untouched snow and you could reel in some fantastic powder turns. The total liquid equivalent in the surface snow above the base isn’t enough for bottomless turns on high-angle terrain just yet, but it was game on for moderate and low-angle terrain. I was on my 115 mm fat boards, and they easily floated me in those terrain areas. And boy, the Bolton Valley faithful definitely got after it early this morning. I was out there in probably the 8-9 AM range, and all the middle terrain on the common descent routes on Wilderness had been skied. There was still plenty of untracked powder along the trail edges and off the beaten path, but people had really been out early in numbers. In Bolton’s case, the resort doesn’t start full 7-day operation until next week, so I bet some folks who might have opted for lift-served skiing went touring today instead. But this storm did hit the valleys quite well and announce itself, so that could have been another factor in people getting out to the mountain.

Hard not to have that feeling actually especially with the way autumn played out.

UKMET is very similar to 18z as well. 00z is a lot of holds trajectory wise, with some dryness.

Not sure about islip. But northwest Suffolk got a period of light snow last night. I’m in commack

WWA maybe by 9am tomorrow from Wakefield? 1-3" RVA

Thanks and don’t know how I missed it

I just remembered that I bared my soul on this 15 or 20 years ago on my website. The page is still there. Some of this will probably have changed (and the MS office versions definitely have), but it's a reasonable representation of my unsound methods: https://www.northshorewx.com/Utilities/ClimateTemplates.html

The Rufus is similar, and a bit south with the snow line, to the other hi-res models. The Rufus is supposed to replace the NAM and NAM 3k at some point. The Rufus has 1.5 inches across downtown Knoxville.

I liked this one for a long time and it’s turning nice but really never went away in my mind. Can one of you get some graphics on where this cold air mass ,for Friday, is and what it looks like ? Ji you called it!! Maybe the Ji53 storm?

Looking at the date on that snowfall map I'm gonna say total snowfall

That would work, but then I would have to continually manually update formulas in many columns in multiple worksheets with the hardcoded number of years. The summary, average and record sheets already require a fair amount of exactly that each year. I'm sure there's a better (less manual) way but I always seem to have higher priorities. I use the NY standard "T". It also stands for Tariff

Holy crap!! Now that's early!! Lol

Is that storm total or total at the time and still snowing?

Definitely Gfs is showing a very active pattern. Alot of us have to be patient.

The NAM, HRRR and RAP all look somewhat similar now.

we've had september-october winter cancel calls before.

Wow I thought it was kinda early for him. But after the string of horrible snow starved winters that a lot of us had .. who can really blame him lol TBH!

Hit 27.8 which is coldest of season for midnight or sooner . Some thin clouds now