Fozz

I was at Timberline yesterday, near Canaan Valley. Went from heavy snow via upslope to sunny and bitterly cold. 

1 minute ago, mdhokie said:

We never do well when NWS goes bullish. Best to see WWAs and over perform than WSWs and shit the blinds.

Yeah I think a WWA for 2-4”, and maybe 3-5” in the favored spots should work. No need to jump the gun on a warning IMO.

Did we just get NAM’d for an event 90% of us gave up on?

12 minutes ago, PrinceFrederickWx said:

I’ve been wondering about this a lot. Could it be that our new normal gives us more Miller B’s, etc., or otherwise a pattern that leaves NYC permanently higher while the Mid-Atlantic trends lower? Will some areas in the northeast be permanently better off? Or are they just now in the feast-or-famine stage, which will eventually transition to all famine (like we seem to be doing)? 

Probably their feast or famine stage. I think it's like psuhoffman and Terpeast said, the changing climate is probably shifting the Hadley cells and speeding up the NS with not as much digging south. That means more Miller Bs which favor 40N and less opportunity for us. But if that trend continues, then we'll probably see a lot more New England exclusive Miller Bs in the future.

Even Philly got 45% more snow than BWI since 2010, which is also ridiculous. From the late 19th century to 2010, they averaged 3% more snow than BWI, and actually had many decades with less. Some of their recent disparity was certainly luck, especially 2013-14.

10 hours ago, psuhoffman said:

2002-2016 wasn’t torrid here. DC and Baltimore were below avg snowfall then, just less below than since!  I made this point that 2002-2016 should have been a huge red flag for places like DC. It was an amazing run with a perfect mean long wave pattern. 

it won’t get much better than that ever. Yet while places further north were getting buried by 150% of normal snow we were getting 90%.  Since 2000 DC and Baltimore decoupled from NYC wrt snowfall. They used to be correlated and get about the same % of normal most years. Not since. It started below 40*. It’s creeping north!  
 

Yes true recent period has sucked like the 50s and early 70s. But it’s worse than those!  About 25% worse. The last good period was worse here than the ones before!  Why do you expect the next favorable pdo amo cycle to buck that trend?  Yes I suspect we will do better than now. That’s not my argument. But will we ever get back to when Baltimore averaged close to 25” which was true from 1890-1970?  Or will the next good period avg 18”?  

Since you mentioned NYC, I took a look at the data between Baltimore and NYC to see how much disparity there was each decade.

Turns out, from the late 19th century to 1990, NYC averaged 25% more snow than Baltimore. The highest decade I found was 75% more for NYC (1940s), while the 1960s actually had slightly more snow in Baltimore.

In the 90s and 00s (including 09-10), NYC averaged around 35% more than Baltimore.

But since 2010, NYC averaged more than 2x the snow of Baltimore, which is completely unprecedented. It is very apparent just from the raw numbers that something has clearly changed. The NY and NNJ snow weenies should take this all as a cautionary tale, because the change isn't stopping any time soon and they aren't going to like where it may eventually take them.

7 minutes ago, Prestige Worldwide said:

pull this leg and it plays jingle bells- 

The mineral pyrite (/ˈpaɪraɪt/ PY-ryte),[6] or iron pyrite, also known as fool's gold, is an iron sulfide with the chemical formula FeS2 (iron (II) disulfide). Pyrite is the most abundant sulfide mineral.[7]

Pyrite cubic crystals on marl from Navajún, La Rioja, Spain (size: 95 by 78 millimetres [3.7 by 3.1 in], 512 grams [18.1 oz]; main crystal: 31 millimetres [1.2 in] on edge)

Pyrite's metallic luster and pale brass-yellow hue give it a superficial resemblance to gold, hence the well-known nickname of fool's gold. The color has also led to the nicknames brass, brazzle, and brazil, primarily used to refer to pyrite found in coal.[8][9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrite

51 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

2002-2016 wasn’t torrid here. DC and Baltimore were below avg snowfall then, just less below than since!  I made this point that 2002-2016 should have been a huge red flag for places like DC. It was an amazing run with a perfect mean long wave pattern. 

it won’t get much better than that ever. Yet while places further north were getting buried by 150% of normal snow we were getting 90%.  Since 2000 DC and Baltimore decoupled from NYC wrt snowfall. They used to be correlated and get about the same % of normal most years. Not since. It started below 40*. It’s creeping north!  
 

Yes true recent period has sucked like the 50s and early 70s. But it’s worse than those!  About 25% worse. The last good period was worse here than the ones before!  Why do you expect the next favorable pdo amo cycle to buck that trend?  Yes I suspect we will do better than now. That’s not my argument. But will we ever get back to when Baltimore averaged close to 25” which was true from 1890-1970?  Or will the next good period avg 18”?  

I used to wonder about that wide disparity between DC/Baltimore and NYC. Seems like that faster NS you mentioned due to the elephant, that was less willing to dig south probably had a big role in that disparity, and led to a lot of Miller Bs that buried New England and sometimes NYC, but screwed our area.

2 minutes ago, brooklynwx99 said:

we just don’t have enough data yet to make actual operational changes in forecasting. models are at least trying to do that somewhat. i’m not even arguing that you’re wrong, but the game of trying to figure out what would or would not have worked like 50 years ago is a dangerous one. i’m not sure if there will ever come a point where i can say “that pattern used to work, but not anymore.” or at least not for a long time 

hell, most of the KU composites are formed from storms that have happened since 2000 as well. that data isn’t just becoming useless now 

It seems like the 2016 super Nino was a major game changer in terms of climate and global temps. If you look at the data, it becomes apparent that these super Ninos tend to break new ground when it comes to global warming. Same thing happened after 1998.

1 minute ago, 87storms said:

Alright, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and reel in this event in order to pave the way for the warning level potential later in the week.

In Deep Creek, right?

4 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

Or…. places south of us aren’t getting much snow either. Yes every once in a blue moon an anomaly happens and somewhere south gets snow. And every time someone posts that it’s a good sign for us.  No it’s not. It just means we are now in the same lot as them where every once in a long while we get a fluke anomaly event to get snow.  The line where snow happens “regularly” in winter has pushed north of us in general.
 

For the last 8 years we’ve been getting the same results as you would expect from upstate SC. Exactly. DC is getting the results you would expect from outside the mountains and I’m getting the results you would expect from a bit higher elevation in NW SC!  

You might be slightly exaggerating. How much snow did you get in winter 2020-21? I remember it being a lot, and I doubt SC in the old climate would’ve gotten that.

It is days like today that convince me that dead ratter seasons are preferable to winters like this. The rug pulls are just so tiring.

Nice overrunning storm in the fantasy range.

23 minutes ago, Ji said:

there has been some awful stretches before

https://www.weather.gov/media/lwx/climate/dcasnow.pdf

1918-1921

1926-1932

1949-1957! Rivals this one

1972-1977

we have seen the best of DMV winters. I will take what we have seen over any generation except for maybe the 60s

I’m just thankful that all my formative years were in those good times. Especially 2003, 2010, 2014, 2016. I’ll never forget those winters, especially if we never get anything like them again.

Just now, nj2va said:

There’s a snow futility, will it ever snow, a CC forum, and panic room - I think there’s plenty of places to complain/post about the elephant.  

Oops… I thought this was the panic thread. My bad. I’ll keep the climate talk there.

11 minutes ago, 87storms said:

I’m about ready to drive to Deep Creek to see 5 lol.

Between the lake cutter upslope and the Monday “event”, there’s a lot of perfectly timed opportunity for the long weekend.

3 minutes ago, Ji said:

Yes people were talking about global warming as much then as now.

It just hadn’t progressed as much yet. The 2016 super Nino changed everything.

4 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

I don know what to say. It’s been awful. Let’s just hope we turn this around in a huge way soon. At least the pattern looks as perfect as we could ask for a chance to do that. But it’s getting hard to keep the faith with every snowless week that goes by.  
 

The one thing I don’t get is why some of the less positive posters here are taking crap. It’s been literally the worst stretch for snow in our history, how can you expect anyone trying to make accurate forecasts to have been positive through that?  You know who has been. JB!  Is that what they want?  

Winter 2013-14, where it snowed just about every week, was only a decade ago. Feels like a lifetime now.

23 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

I’m not saying the snowless streak will go on that long. For the record I think the snowlessness is a combo of bad cycle and warming. We likely get a somewhat better period at some point even with warming. 
 

But let’s say it doesn’t improve. What if we continue at the same snowfall rate we’ve had on avg the last 8 years where DC is averaging about what Charlotte NC or Spartanburg SC should!  How long do you think before those denying the climate has changed come around?  2 more years?  5 more years?  Are we in 2040 and it’s been 25 years since Baltimore had a 6” snow and they’re still saying it’s just bad luck and we will turn it around any day now?  

By then it’ll be time to move to Labrador.

This frame from the 12z Euro made me panic because I just know that in the old climate, this would've been snow for the cities in mid-January.

32 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

Not yet but we knew coming in the concern.  Nino patterns have historically been very snow...but also not very cold...and many of the snowstorms were in patterns that were marginally cold enough even in the past.  Would that still work?  We have had a couple perfect track rainstorms already.  If that keeps happening we have our answer.  

Which rainstorm this season with temps in the 30s had a “perfect track” (by 20th century standards)?

I think this past weekend storm was probably too close to the coast, but a few decades ago I imagine it would’ve been 3-6” for the cities followed by a changeover, instead of nearly all rain.

50 minutes ago, Ji said:

Nino should be easy for us. This is too hard

It’s only ever easy for us in the rare historic years where IAD or BWI get 50+. But most of those years are Nino so they’re always the back of our mind

4 minutes ago, Maestrobjwa said:

Yeah we know DANG well it wasn't last year, lolol

Last year was an atrocity here.

1 hour ago, DDweatherman said:

Last year I took the family up to deep creek/swanton for MLK weekend. We had 6-10” from the storm that came through which was too warm for the folks further east. Then the upslope turned on and we had whiteouts on and off. Finished at 21-22” for the weekend

I think that was 2022. Incredible event though.

I see some nice upslope potential for MLK weekend in the mountains @nj2va

I was at Whitetail yesterday, where they ended up with around 6-8”.

It was a rainstorm until I was close to Hagerstown, and afterwards it didn’t take long to change over to heavy snow. Fun times.