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Snow is good anytime, but February is melt season and often the beginning of mud season. December- and January snow is more emotionally and aesthetically valuable at our latitude.

Moderator bncho ladies and gentlemen.

I still think the only thing going for us is that NYC had a good december, and that tends to correlate well with the rest of winter (when it's a La Nina winter). But even now, we have fallen below average, and it just sees so hard to score something over here. We'll have to wait for a Feb 2015, Feb 2021, or Feb 2013 scenario. In all 3 of those years, most of December and January was a dud until end of the month and then we had a wintry February to bring us up to average or above average.

I noticed this coincided with the relay off the Pacific into the more physically realized sounding domain out west, which began taking place over the last 30 hours ...

You rolled the dice and got snake eyes apparently.

This 1,000%. So much has to be in place for a KU.

you're right, actually, h5 has been looking pretty damn good this winter (e.g. Jan 15 ULL) but those h5 looks aren't translating to the surface, where's it's often cold and dry.

Verification proves each run is more likely to be accurate now, however there is more chaos imo. 20 years ago I think I was able to use the models more functionally. They weren’t more likely to be correct but they had more consistent fail patterns you could adjust for. Now they fail in different ways that are impossible to predict run to run.

Agreed. The favorable "look" though always had some missing pieces in my book. No doubt it looked reasonably good aloft for a time and it was worth watching but some key pieces always seemed to be missing.

Any model is going to have a greater degree of error past 5 days than in the short term. So many different pieces need to fall in to place to get a huge snowstorm for the big cities in the Atlantic corridor. The Greenland block needs to be in just the right spot. EPO, NAO, AO, PNAall set up just right. MJO in the right phase. Not too strong of a high coming down from Canada. Anything out of place and that big storm doesn't form or hit. This is why I try not to get excited about anything past 5 days, no matter which model is showing something.

I storm chased in the Plains most years 1992-2016.

Oh, I'm NOT 'doom and gloom', more irritated at following 10-30 day outlooks when I should know better. Yes, the 'uppers' have looked great most of the winter (well, except for that Christmas week, which it did a great job of picking up) and then the closer we get to those 'good looks'.....

Agreed. We are at least in the game for the next few weeks. All we can ask for here in the subtropics. CPC has us below normal temps on days 6-10 and days 8-14. Precip looks hard to find though.

I absolutely love your spirit, enthusiasm, optimism and love of weather. Don't give up. One day the big one will come. Half the fun is in the tracking so we watch and wait. It is only half time for meteorological winter so we'll see what the second half delivers.

Yes, IIRC, when you mentioned the Dec 1994 hybrid storm (really a 70 kt hurricane, and the it will likely get included as one officially once the Hurricane Reanalysis Project reaches the 90s - it is in the early 70s now), I went to CoastalWx, "how did you know about that?!" Well, a valid question b/c there was no snow w/ it!

That’s been getting can kicked this season too.

Rinse, lather, repeat. Same thing will happen with the signal around the 20th.

The hype started based on long-range anomaly charts about a week ago. A favorable "look" on those charts is like cat-nip to some people. The ICON, then GFS, and eventually ECM gave credence to this hype for a while.

Time to gas up for the cape system.

It's times like this that I would like to remind everyone that we could be chasing super long range pattern changes or dealing with Pac Puke funneling into the US coupled with a raging SER. It could (and routinely has in the past 10 years) been worse than we have it right now. While it sucks to see a potentially fun dynamic system not go our way, you can't look at the models last night and tell me we don't own any serious chances in the next two weeks. I'll gladly take flakes or a coating from either system while I wait for things to materialize.

And he's the one telling people in SNE to move

Ten storms 20"+ is impressive. Our locale averages nearly 90"/season but only 7 events 20+ (plus 19.9" on March 7-9, 2018). Only common events were Dec 2003 and Jan 2015. Even your 15 storms of 16"+ is one more than here (and only adds March 13-15, 2018 as common), though we've had 4 more of 15-15.5". I've noted that big snowstorms are similar whether in NNJ where I grew up and any of the Maine locations where we lived. Even in Fort Kent, which averaged 134"/season in our 9.7 snow seasons there, had only 3 of 20+ and 6 of 16+. They had loads of the more modest events, though, 24 of 10"+ and 63 of 6"+. In our 27 winters here, it's 47 of 10+ and 117 of 6+.

300-400 mile move in 24 hours....though the possibility was always there due to the massive spread on ensembles. But there's a reason a few days ago I mentioned that 1/15-16 would be all gravy if we got it....it was a very thread-the-needle type look if there ever was one to use as an example.

Jesus, better move to Barrow. I think 5/5 would be nice.... 1/1 spring and fall, assuming its deep winter.

The GFS and GEFS have performed poorly for our local area for the past few wintry potential threats. I know local performance is highly variable and somewhat random, and I haven't seen updated verification scores, but I do wonder if the brain drain that started at NOAA/NCEP around 2016 might be finally catching up to us.