CAPE

Judah thinks there might be some winter in N America by MLK day. Maybe by Feb for the east coast?

Upper 30s is getting into cold rain territory, and that's always better than mild rain.

Definitely a legit looking ridge towards the end of this run. Maybe there was more spread on the previous runs wrt to exact location, causing flatter height lines on the mean.

That is the general look that I was touting last night with the Euro weeklies and this morning on the extended GEFS. I get your point about ridge placement sensitivity, but we are playing with fire almost all the time anyway. As long as that trough isn't a monster sitting over GoA, it think we will be in pretty good shape, and a ridge might get us a little more cold to work with.

That is a nice progression and can work despite marginal cold with a block like that. Lets hope we see more of that inside day 15 over the next few days

Wait a minute now.. I am effing exhausted though. I almost forgot how optimistic I was this morning when I posted those extended GEFS maps. I know what I am rooting for that won't matter in the least.

I guess everyone can root for the variation they think is better, and its going to do what its going to do regardless, and we will all live with the results lol.

That vortex needs to relax though. We aren't getting any cold now, other than briefly behind a storm, and it isn't even that cold. Need to strike some sort of balance, and flirting with a SE ridge is par for the course in a Nina. As long as we have legit blocking, a mean trough further west could still work. That vortex has been dumping energy out west and amplifying it, and we ridge out anyway with storms tracking NW.

Well, we were told it was meteorologically impossible anyway. I cant remember who that was lol.

But that premise is based on the past/current normal, which would no longer exist. In all seriousness, the advertised pattern on the extended tools includes an EPO ridge, and that may be exactly what we need to flush the puke and get some decent cold- which is where this whole discussion started this morning. No we don't want winters dominated by an EPO blocking ridge with a +AO/NAO, and a WAR.

Its more of a crapshoot for sure. There is a high risk of cutters/inland runners with storms that amplify without NA help. I would need at least some timely -NAO episodes for it to work out here most of the time. The one big snow/slop storm in 2014 did not go so well here. eta- remember, the context with which I brought it up was possible "new normal" going forward, lol. So the historical stuff would become less useful.

Yeah they look close. I just think there are probably enough subtleties than cant be detected by comparing past h5 composites to a current projected mean. I would have to be convinced that the current Pacific state is not more hostile than say back in Feb 2010, despite the similar h5 looks. As I said in a discussion we had the other day, I am willing to consider the possibility that what used to be our "money looks" for snow events here may not work as well anymore. Maybe a -EPO becomes the new -AO.

Not sure those composites necessarily match what we have going on now all that well. Sure they are close at first glance. The one on the left implies a PNA ridge and the one on the right has some ridging in the EPO/WPO domain. Also hard to gauge the strength of the NE PAC trough, and what may be different impacts from ENSO background state, ocean temp anomalies, and Pac jet strength/ position now vs using 10+ year old analogs.

It does get some -6 to -10 up there a few days later. Outside of something dramatic happening as a result of the SWE, we will probably have to make do with moderate cold.

Most everything in nature is sinusoidal.

No one knows, but all can speculate.

Retro the trough and get an EPO ridge(or coupled +PNA/-EPO) and we can shut off that firehose.

I think we had one of those in Jan 2016.

The -NAO with a horrid Pac isn't likely to make many people happy, so.. The other interesting thing with the advertised +heights over Baffin in the LR- and this is being debated in the NE forum- is that it may be the result of mild Pac air flow across Canada, warming and expanding the column, and producing those anomalous 500 mb heights, vs an actual ridge(anticyclone) which should have an adjacent trough over the east. I am not sure if I buy that, but there doesn't seem to be much curvature to the height lines once the +heights move into the sweet spot. I think that is probably more an artifact of a smoothed mean 15 days out. Either way, the PAC needs to become less hostile going forward or we will likely continue to struggle for chances of frozen.

Looking at 50 mb and 500 mb height/temp anomalies on the LR GEFS would imply strat-trop coupling and a favorable environment for continued HL blocking.

I would trade that look with a much more favorable Pac and less blocking for what the models are advertising over the next 10 days or so.

Extended GEFS has the look we need to flush the Pac puke and inject legit cold into our source region. Hopefully we get there, but it will take some time. eta- h5 is actually much improved out west by mid Jan, but still relatively mild in the lower levels at that time.

I think we are getting close to full on bipolar mode in the LR thread. A tad earlier than usual this winter.

Ours is coming. We just have to be patient.

UK getting some decent snow the past few days. My friend who lives outside Manchester is getting snowed on now. Pretty good pattern for them going forward. They can do much better than usual when there is a NA block.