roardog

I think it was Jan 2006 where there was a night where it snowed for about 10 hours and literally none of it stuck. lol. It was just light snow but the temperature was around 35 the entire time it was snowing. Another one that I remember is April 2000 I think it was. There was a winter storm warning but none of it stuck that day although it snowed the entire day. It didn’t help that it was April but it was in the mid 30s the entire day. The following night, it dropped down to about 30 and we got a coating of snow on the grass.

The difference between heavy snow and 30 degrees and heavy snow and 33 or 34 degrees is huge imo. I actually kind of hate snowstorms where the surface temp is above freezing. It feels like you “waste” a lot of snow to melting but at the same time it sticks to everything and causes tree damage and power outages.

Was hoping for a snowstorm that day so there could be some weenie accumulation during the eclipse. Just kidding. lol but that would be interesting to see.

Your office is full of trash. Do you have a janitor or maintenance or something? lol

I know this is the March thread but I’d like to point out that April is my least favorite month. Let’s just get right on to May.

The ‘22-‘23 winter was probably about the worst Nina pattern we can get for this area. The western trough/eastern ridge is expected in a Nina but it was amplified to the extreme. If it would have been even a little less amplified, it would have been much more interesting here. It was great for Minnesota though.

As has been discussed a gazillion times on here, the 1930s heat was different than what we’ve experienced in recent years. Recent years warmth is due to higher dewpoints causing warm lows. The 1930s heat is low dewpoint record highs. The only years of my life that might be comparable are 1988 and 2012.

If we could end up with a +2 next winter, it would feel like living in the Arctic compared to these past two winters.

Nothing about the pattern on any of the ensembles look “warm” after this week. It’s all relative and doesn’t mean there can’t be a warm day or days in there but the overall look certainly isn’t warm. I mean we are talking late March so a high in the upper 30s would be well below normal across much of this sub by the end of March. Nobody is talking about days and days of mid winter cold.

All the ensembles are showing strong ridging in western Canada and into Alaska in the medium range. If that’s correct, it will release unseasonably cold air into the eastern half of the US regardless of what the models actually show for temp deviations right now. The euro ensemble mean actually shows around 7 or 8 degrees below average at 850 just after day 10 in the Great Lakes. That’s impressive for an ensemble mean.

I know most here consider Bastardi a clown but one thing he always talks about is how if the WPO is positive, any -EPO will be short lived. Only when they are negative in tandem is the -EPO sustainable.

The drought was so bad in 1988 that even though it had the hottest temperatures I’ve seen in my lifetime around here, it could really cool down at night when the cooler air masses did come in because it was extremely dry.

what causes these “marine heatwaves” we are seeing? A gradual warming of the air in earth should take years or decades even to warm the deep ocean waters. You have to warm the deeper waters from the turning over of the water. That would take a long time. The marine heatwaves have to be fairly shallow since they disappear as fast as they start sometimes.

I feel for you guys down there. You've been through some rough times in an area that is already rough if you like winter weather. You guys finally get a Nino like you were hoping for after 3 winters of Nina and it's a super Nino with a -PDO. The closest example of that is '72-'73 and if you look at the mean 500MB anomaly map from this winter, to no surprise it looks almost identical to '72-'73. Add in a warmer world and the result shouldn't have been surprising to anyone. The extreme -PDO that has developed since the late 2010s has obviously been a big problem for you guys and the entire east coast. We can't buy a sustained winter +PNA since the PDO nosedived but I just can't believe it's some kind of permanent change. My guess is it's no more permanent than the north pacific "warm blob" was in the mid 2010s.

These snowfall deficits are still all pattern driven though. The pattern has been bad for big snow for years now for Ohio to the north and east into parts of Ontario like Toronto. There’s also probably some bad luck in there too. Since the PDO went back negative after the super Nino of ‘15-‘16, any +PNA patterns have been very short lived during the cold season. There’s also been very little sustained high latitude blocking. Once you get south and east of Michigan, it’s tough to keep sustained winter weather with a -PNA and no blocking. I believe Jan and Feb 2022 had a +PNA in the means and guess what? Most of of this sub ended up with a cold winter. Snow is obviously fluky so a cold winter doesn’t always guarantee a lot of snow of course.