Eskimo Joe

Personally, I don't want an amped storm at the start of this pattern change. Let's just get a nice cold powder, plowable storm to get us on the board. It's going to take a bit to knock down the SE ridge and I don't want to give that thing any more juice. Plus, December climo is hostile to snow to begin with. Anything we get this early on is house money.

OP runs will waffle a lot until we transition into the new pattern.

That's really encouraging. I'd like to see it nose up to a +1/+2 and settle there. Obviously since we are in a La Nina base state the Pacific can only get so cooperative, but to see it trend that way is good. A raging -PNA for weeks on end would just flood us with Pacific puke.

The neat thing about that storm was the fact that it was just a solid cold powder event with minimal temp issues. It really illustrated how strong the blocking was setting up that winter. Ironically, I was at a geography conference in New Paltz, NY in October 2009 and there was a grad student at SUNY who was researching NAO spatial relationships with the upcoming winter. They had forecast that a NAO which went negative during the summer, and was focused near a certain lat/lon had a statistically significant correlation to above average snowfall but not necessarily temperature in the northeast US. they had gone out on a limb and said the summer of 2009 NAO matched up with a forecast of above average snowfall for the upcoming winter. I've been trying to find the conference proceedings from that event to see if I could get the presentation or locate the authors, but alas I've come up empty.

No. +PNA, -AO always

That was a great storm. I was at Millersville Univ at the time working 2nd shift IT. We were really sweating the northern edge leading up to the event. A lot of the model guidance was giving the Mason-Dixon Line about 8"-12", but Harrisburg less than 5". You could tell CTP was really sweating it because their AFD was very conservative. The Thursday night before the storm, the 12z guidance came in much snowier across the board and the watches went up almost as soon as the Euro OP finished. The 00z guidance came in and boom warnings. I wound up driving back to Philly early for the holiday and my graduation was canceled.

As others have said several times, namely @WxUSAF, do not look at OP models past D10. This is especially true with potentially volatile pattern changes.

Nice to see the ridge over Idaho remain and even sharpen up a bit on the EPS. That's always a good sign for east cost snow.

Sunset tonight should be amazing.

Yes.

I'm at the Greenbriar Resort from Jan 5 - 8. Hoping to see some snow in the mountains.

Makes for the best sun rises and sun sets.

Hopefully the reload is short lived and we can maintain something good through Jan 10 - 15.

Low of 34 RSTM2 Co-Op site.

Kind of makes you wonder if things are behaving like an El Nino base state (preview of next winter?).

Where do I sign?

About 5:45 pm. It's PEPCO turf, but the line service some BGE territory in Howard and Baltimore Counties. It's entirely possible the flickering was the smart grid technology struggling to adjust to power demands so rapidly.

Approximately 90k w/o power. Expect protracted restoration. Get the candles out.

Tucker now has a better 3-point percentage than LaBron.

I call dibs on Christmas snow thread.