NeonPeon

You call that fog? Hahaha.

It looks great if you are a marine mammal. It's actually this exact type of setup that we do well with from time to time, it's consolidating into a nice band. It's just mostly over water. Westerly/new london looks good.

Finally began snowing. Death band incoming. 1 inch? A few more of these and I'll be in double digits this year. Sorry, getting greedy.

I wish the radar actually looked like that. Still dry here, should start soon though. I'll take a refresher. I totally missed the last snow. Entire family got the flu, what an ordeal.

Blob over orient point, blob at the northern ri border, a rare case where the screw hole isn't here. Though it isn't exactly a hole since the entire thing is too fast and ragged.

2 so far, always interesting when there's little wind. Not bad at all, it's just all moving too fast. If this was slower there would be even more have and have nots though, I'd guess. The best stuff down this way is falling in the sound so far and just offshore.

Wasn't the idea of dry slotting making local qpf forecasting moderately difficult something raised days ago in the actual forecast discussion by box. What is new about this?

The box forecast has a very typical gradient of doubling snow from Newport proper to about 10 miles north of here, and that's typical. I'll still take it, but when these things show themselves across models, my experience is that my microclimate underperforms vs over performs. The bay likes to warm. I need any ptype issues out to block island to not be worried, more robust antecedent cold, and much more dynamic powerful systems than this.

Speak for yourself.

This is beginning to look more slushy than sleddy for the kids Sunday morning. The dreaded "a good region wide event."

Went skating on the pond again. You never know when it'll be the last time. Definitely the last time in this little stretch, the warming was making it start to sound a little sketchy, and it's open water in places from yesterdays melt.

Whoever reported 3 for Newport is full of it, but that's probably that Middletown location. Enough to sled on for three hours and I'll take that.

Looks like fun is almost over down here. Enough to justify a nice walk in the snow and enough for the kids to do some slightly grassy sledding if it freezes up a bit more in the early morning. I'll take whatever I can get.

I know, whatever next. Big wet flakes.

Snowing nicely once the lull ended. There was zero mixing.

Someone from Maine the other day said they might be relocating down here, and what was the winter like. What I should have said was well, do you like looking up through the rain at a street lamp, and convincing yourself through sheer will, that droplets of rain have pseudo crystalline structures? Because if so, boy, oh boy, are you going to love it down this way. I've spent hours with this street lamp. Many things lie in the world of meteorology, if you aren't rigorous in your probabilistic thinking. That street lamp though, it's a straight shooter, the wretched bastard.

Such a tiny little core. Wonder what the ceiling is.

The educated people you know can't read a weather forecast then. Preparing for the worst here meant a very normal track deviation of just a few miles in either direction causing the worst of a storm surge to go into one of two bays, it had nothing to do with the storm being stronger than forecast.

You've started strawmanning "FLORIDA WILL BE WIPED OFF THE FACE OF THE MAP, THIS IS THE END TIMES" and now are in the position of waving away significant destruction, even as it's being uncovered. Stop responding to stupid media by having diametrically opposed equally stupid opinions. Stop characterizing the most extreme opinion as definitive. That is why public discourse is broken. Try ignoring the sensationalism, listening to the calm, intelligent voices, then you can have an adult conversation. Or, carry on, I guess.

Fort Myers they were almost identical. Naples a foot higher, yes. I think that reflects the fact that the hurricane at a lower latitude was stronger, and that in this case anyway, the surge was reactive to the immediate intensity. When I was watching Naples yesterday, I thought we'd see much more surge than Helene in the area between Bonita Beach and Englewood, say. I certainly thought that Fort Myers would be significantly higher than Helene, and it was basically the same. Obviously that narrow band that got the worst onshore wind got whacked, and that never happened with Helene as it was miles away. I think the fact that Milton was small also means that the direction of wave travel wasn't the same, nor for as long a period of time. You can see that in the fact that the surges recorded for Helene are broader, instead of spikes you have hills.

You can compare the forecast surge to the reports we do have and draw your own conclusions without being obsessed with overperformance/underperformance or somehow emotionally involved. Surge is an interesting thing to discuss because it doesn't have a linear relationship with storm strength and has many confounding variables including very granular detail with regard to final landfall track, the tide, topography of bays etc. etc. There had been a prevalent thought that this storm would punch above its weight surge wise due to its antecedent strength. That doesn't seem to be the case, in that the really damaging worst case surge we see is is mainly confined to the southern side of the core of the storm, which was afterall quite a small area relative to other hurricanes, but there are lots of details to this. For instance, the breadth of its surge at the lower end is in keeping with the forecast, with areas like Naples and even further south getting surges in line with forecast. The higher end of the forecast also seems to have verified, but in a narrower band. There's also the risk management side to the forecast in terms of messaging. Forecasters became increasingly confident that landfall north of tampa bay wasn't going to occur, but the risk was massive. Narrow or not, if the worst surge was someplace else, just a little further south in Charlotte Harbor, or a little further north in Tampa Bay, and you see worse effects and they had to be advertised. The other thing occurring is it's pretty natural to make comparisons between this and the previous hurricane, especially in areas where there are similar effects despite completely different tracks. Size matters.

I'm not sure. I know someone on Pine Island, and the surge was bad but not as bad as Helene. Obviously it greatly matters exactly where you are, but excepting the area that got really nailed with the back end of the eye, the surge seems significant but not catastrophic.

The surge seems to have been less broad than expected in terms of the area affected with the worst of it. Many places were on the level of Helene. The other thing is that this thing threaded the needle in terms of surge. Charlotte Harbor was just south of the worst and east of it when the storm came in, and the worst surge seems to have behaved like this was a small hurricane, with a small core, even though the windfield was more dispersed. Obviously a bullet was dodged with Tampa Bay also. So it would have been worse further north, or further south.

Ft Myers water level has now peaked. Slightly higher than Helene but two feet lower than Ian. Now second worst since that station was in. The surge forecast around Tampa Bay is just having to sit on a fence, given uncertainty of landfall detail, but the south of landfall storm surge seems to be underperforming expectation in general thankfully. The surges we can see so far are very similar to Helene, which while such a big beast, passed these areas so much more distantly, and without these winds driving the water.

Fort Myers at 5+ ft of storm surge, still increasing. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/stationhome.html?id=8725520