Yeoman

2 hours ago, EastCoast NPZ said:

That's it.  I just sold my snow thrower.  Used once since the 2016 storm (and that was at my old place in cross junction).  Oil drained and replaced yearly, paid to move twice...all just to sit in my garage and collect dust.  Literally looks as good as the day I bought it.  It would've never gotten used again in stephens city, unless maybe to cleanup future sandstorms.

Cool story.. hopefully your crops are doing better

2 minutes ago, J.Mike said:

Serious question: is Ji ok?

He's covering Creed at the McLean Bible Church this morning.

1 minute ago, EHoffman said:

I don't even care about accums now, if I don't see thundersnow this storm is a bust

In DC I wouldn't either... it will likely be history if you wake up after 9am.

14 minutes ago, Terpeast said:

I’m starting to prefer that. When we lose school days, the kiddo stays home and the only time she’s in a happy mood is when we’re playing outside in the snow. But if we’re not outside, it’s tantrum galore. Rather send her to preschool and keep the snow on weekends when she’s home anyway. 

That’ll change when she hits kindergarten or first grade, but for now… yeah. 

She's probably just angry you call her "kiddo"

24 minutes ago, snowmagnet said:

I don’t understand why the national weather service didn’t give us at least a hazardous outlook warning for slick roads. 

Maybe they assume people have common sense

At least we're putting a dent in the drought

1 hour ago, Shad said:

thoughts on hour 240 of Euro?

It's hour 240

30 minutes ago, Scarlet Pimpernel said:

The complaints about "too warm leading in!" for the potential PD-3 event around here are ridiculous.  First, it's 200+ hours out!  Second (if you really want to get into the details!), the temperatures literally crash as the storm begins and it remains quite cold for a couple of days after.  The same temperature depiction was shown for 00Z and 06Z, when everyone was ga-ga over this.  Again, it's 200+ hours out, but the overall hints for this general time period have been discussed at length.

And your comment about cold smoke in March...spot on!  The one I remember best was March 5, 2015.  That featured a front that went through early in the morning followed by rapid cooling, as a wave moved up the front and gave us that storm.  In fact, I recall @Deck Pic (I think it was him?) very early that morning saying watch how many people freak out because it wouldn't be snowing yet when they woke up, when the event wouldn't really start until mid-morning.  And sure enough, people freaked out because it was still wet but no snow falling...even as the damned storm was right on our doorstep (and it began snowing shortly after)!

I think that was actually Zwyts.. regardless, a tremendous call, indeed!

43 minutes ago, TSG said:

Okay I went back and read... going to disagree pretty strongly with this entire statement. If you thought Feb 5/6 wasn't a long shot when we saw it pop up around the 25th, you weren't paying attention close enough. Numerous posts about how it would be nice to score during our "lull" that week. Here's a few from around then...

 

And what do we see on the 11/12th and beyond the last few GFS runs? Cold air being reestablished with shortwaves sliding across to our south.

If the can has been kicked it's like 2 days

I guess low 50s is considered cold these days.. 

5 hours ago, Weather Will said:

Positive news for WB 6Z GEFS, cold air gets reestablished President's weekend.

Nice.. 49 degrees instead of 52

1 hour ago, NorthArlington101 said:

This is why we lose people. We’re looking 3 weeks ahead (fine… 2.5) and have been tracking epic patterns for weeks.

I think it’s actually a credit to modeling that I’m starting to go insane. We’ve seen this look for so long you’d swear up and down it’s been 15 days away for a month. And it’s still 15 days away.

The sooner you realize models are clueless beyond a few days the less you'll pay attention to that nonsense and maintain your sanity..

2 hours ago, WEATHER53 said:

Is mid Feb  (10th to 19th) still on or delayed to 20th to 29th? 

Now looking like the 30th

13 minutes ago, thunderbolt said:

No the week of the 14th

Only if Phil sees his shadow on Friday

21 minutes ago, thunderbolt said:

I guess you’re not liking this time period Coming up 

The epic pattern that was supposed to start next week?

37 minutes ago, aldie 22 said:

What happened did you get laid off or something?

Not yet.. you'll know I've been laid off when I start posting as much as Ji

1 minute ago, stormy said:

I received 9 inches on April 7, 1971 at 1300 ft. !!!!!   At 1850 ft, April 7, 1971 received 17 inches...

Must have been flying Air Randy

6 minutes ago, Kevin Reilly said:

I love it Pineapple Express???  How is this a Pineapple Express when the flow is not coming from Hawaii.  Look at the Water Vapor Map.  This "Pineapple Express" is used for one thing especially in this case Ratings!!

 

Pennsylvania Water Vapor Satellite Weather Map | AccuWeather

He meant the jet extension

1 hour ago, Ji said:

pretty scary thought---because if we dont see a big snow or two......this hobby is pretty much done

Time to dust off the crochet kit

1 hour ago, mattie g said:

Do better, man. Seriously.

Exactly.. dig harder and you'll find some random model that shows what you want to see..

3 minutes ago, Scarlet Pimpernel said:

Let's just let things unfold as they will, however it happens.  We see the remarkable agreement across all ensembles and it has been now showing up in some ops runs more and more in the ops extended ranges.  And the extended ensembles/weeklies have been pretty emphatic through the first part of March thus far.  Don't worry or get caught up in specific dates or apparent times that "nothing much happened" or "PD is our time!"  I mentioned this before, but remember in 2016 there was talk about how we have a relative lack of snow events the 3rd week or so of January...whether due to chance or some actual meteorological reason (traditional Jan. thaw, that sort of thing)?  Then something happened Jan. 22-23, 2016...trying to put my finger on it, I recall getting some decent snow then...LOL!!!

Sounds great, and will do

4 minutes ago, CAPE said:

This is probably our next trackable window. Seeing an indication of a shortwave in the southern stream with improvements in the high latitudes.

Awesome! Just needs to hold for 56 more model runs..

6 hours ago, JenkinsJinkies said:

I looked at the Weather Channel, DC will only reach freezing once between now and Feb 9th.

What does Sue Polka say?

1 hour ago, stormtrucker said:

Fog during the day, roads turning to ice at night. Rinse and repeat next 7 days before it gets real warm. 

Can I find you on Intragram?

On 3/10/2023 at 10:06 AM, psuhoffman said:

I also don't think my "emotions" are driving my points here.  Actually, what I am doing runs contrary to emotions.  I don't want this to be true.  I think emotions are actually the reason many are so hostile and resistant to some of this data and get upset when it's presented.  Actually 90% of what I have posted in this thread isn't predictive at all...its simply pointing out data and evidence of trends that have already happened.  

First of all this trend is not just the last 7 years.  Snowfall is a very anomalous fluky thing in our region.  It runs in cycles some of which have some regularity based on decadal cycles and some of which is pure fluke luck mixed in.  So if you focus only on one small sample size you can skew the picture.  But when you pull back and look at 100 years or more the patterns become more meaningful.  Yes there are up and down cycles within the trend line but there is a downward trend within that chaos.  The up periods are less up and the down periods are more down.   This current down cycle is no doubt a "down period" but it's worse than the last comparable down periods of this type.  This trend has been going on for a long time not just recently.  

It's definitely more apparent in the median than the mean because within this trend there is a phenomenon that we are also getting a few super crazy snowy years mixed in.  Part of this seems to be because the frequency of HECS events has increased.  This can also logically be explained by the same phenomenon causing the lowering of the snowfall median as a warmer base state with both reduce the number of snowfalls but also increase the chances of a super big snowstorm in the rarer instances that it is cold enough.  

There are a lot of factors here going on that in isolation each one might be hard to attribute a significant portion of this but the issue is all of these factors are all influencing things the same way, and if taken in totality I don't think its a stretch to say that is what is impacting our snow climo.  Unfortunately we are in a region that is being most affected by several of these factors when it comes to snowfall, at least median, like I said the mean is less affected because of HECS events skewing the mean.  But factors like the expanded Pacific Hadley cell, the Indo-PAC warm pool, and the warming gulf and atlantic basin are all impacting our area specifically more so than some other places.  We don't have the latitude or elevation to survive even a small push northwest of the boundary during winter along the east coast, and unfortunately all of those factors lead to that end result.  

The indo pac warm pool is favoring hostile mjo phases which leaves more of our winter in shit the blinds patterns.  The expanded hadley cell is shifting the jet north and causing a compressed flow over the north pacific (pac firehose) directing more warmth into the CONUS than was typical in the past.  The warmer gulf and atlantic is feeding the SER.  The warmer base state of the pac is favoring la nina's in the effort to balance the heat which is a bad thing for us.   It's a nasty feedback loop for our snow hopes and dreams.  

My emotions actually make me want to resist this some.  That is why I almost always bust high on my seasonal predictions.  You know from my posts all summer and fall i knew this year was going to be awful.  I think everyone got tired of me saying how god awful things looked wrt prospects for this winter.  Part of that was a generally bad longwave configuration but a lot was me knowing what that imposed onto the current warm base state would look like for us.  But when it came time for me to make a seasonal forecast I did go below avg snowfall but not nearly enoough below.  Because I just didn't want to fathom a snowless winter, but in my gut I kinda knew this was very possible if not likely.  But I went more hopeful in my forecast.  I did that again with right now.  I knew in my gut that given the extreme warm base state it was unlikely any patter was going to work out in a big way for us in March...but I didn't want to just give up on winter totally and I knew March was likely to be our only chance at a decent longwave pattern so I held out hope and said maybe we do get something in March.  I am actually to optimistic wrt our snow chances because of my emotions.  I sometimes ignore the data and evidence because I want it to snow and I want the data to be wrong.  

All that said I am also sure this is also a down cycle.  We have had a run of hostile longwave pattern seasons where even in a better climo period it was likely to be a down period.  This period can be analogous to similar periods in the 1950's, 1970s, and late 80's into early 90s.  Those were all bad too...just not as bad.  I am sure we will have a better period ahead at some point...but will it be as good as past good periods... probably not and that is the issue.  I am sure the next time we get a 30" winter some will say "see the doom and gloom was wrong, everything is fine" but that isn't the point.  No one is saying it can't snow anymore.  We are saying it is snowing less.  ANd all the data proves that.  That isn't predictive its a reality we have been living for a while now.  The only valid question is "how much less".  

The author of this novel, driven by data rather than emotions, highlights a long-term downward trend in snowfall in their region, attributing it to various climatic factors and acknowledging their own emotional bias in wanting more optimistic snow forecasts despite the evidence.

53 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

Something continues to be a recurring theme, great looking pattern, lackluster snow output. Yesterday’s euro control was the best example yet. 
This 30 day mean pattern 

Still put the axis of snow north of us 

with that pattern we should be more worried about suppression. It’s been doing this a lot. Suggesting the snow will be displaced north of where I expect based on the pattern. Not saying I buy it. Long range snow means aren’t often great tools. Just flagging this in case it does happen to note the models keep showing it. 

Hard to believe an 1100 hr model run wouldn't make sense.. Maybe it all falls in March