LibertyBell

Yeah we were-- that was also part of climate change

There is no such thing as "luck"-- when people can't explain something they resort to this kind of magic. The pattern in the early 00s was part of the impact of climate change too-- more moisture in the atmosphere and changing storm tracks storms that would normally be suppressed like they were in the colder 80s were now tracking favorably for us. You just have to look at how DC snowfall totals have plummeted as proof-- in a way, we are getting some of the snow that should have been theirs. Now that climate change has further evolved with the warm pool and even warmer conditions, we are going to start to learn what it feels like to live in DC. The climate is always changing and there is no such thing as "average"-- it's an always moving target, it's just moving faster now because of what humans are doing.

They flipped because they weren't handling that warm pool well.

Yeah this magical luck thing reminds me of the sabremetric crowd ugh.

I'm not sure man. Climate is dynamic not static and it keeps changing (even if human influence wasn't there, the climate would still change.) There really is no such thing as average.

I didn't plan on making 15 posts lol....the weird thing is during the day I make a similar number of posts but because a lot more people are participating, it ends up being maybe 25% of the total and not more than 2-3 in a row. I'll try to do it at night though because that was excessive (even for me).

Typical very low season total but not low enough to be a record. Ma Nature takes the excitement out of everything....

I wonder if there is an airport with the three letter code EWW. We should troll them.

Possibly lol. It's much easier to do in the late night hours when few people are around lol. During the day when everyone is posting it would be like every third or fourth post lol.

Thanks Walt, looks like 6-8 inches in the Poconos and there's one report of 10" edit-- I'm very close to that area just south of I-80 where 8.1" was reported! That's the highest amount I can find south of Scranton.

Did 1989-1990 have the largest gap between first and last single digit lows in the modern era (from the 1950s onwards)? As I recall the low in December was an utterly frigid 4 degrees. The only colder December reading I can remember was a shocking negative 1 on Christmas morning 1980 (accompanied by a coating of snow!)

Yes and in 2014 it was almost on March 1st! When was the last time it got into the single digits in March around here? The coldest March weather I can remember was what followed the 1993 blizzard. Weird thing about 1990 was that it was in the 80s just two weeks after that single digit reading and then it snowed at the start of April.

That does sound like March 2005-- more extreme though.

Chris, when you posted those model accuracy plots I noticed the GFS went below the 0.6 threshold at 10 days and was only barely above it at 9 days. The Euro on the other hand was above the 0.6 threshold going all the way out to 11 days. I suspect the CMC would be similar?

Thanks Ed, do you perchance know how much snow fell at NYC and our Queens airports? Kind of reminds me of March 2005 or the two mid-late February 2010 storms.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if the reason they flipped warmer is the same reason they flipped on the snowstorm? Maybe IF the snowstorm had happened we would have THEN had the sustained cold pattern, but WITHOUT the snowstorm we will get a New Years torch instead!

wow that actually could have been an analog for this season since it was a third year la nina too. We still have time before the end of the month to make it happen ;-)

Wow I wish I could have experienced that! Are there any local snowfall totals from the area? Even if the totals aren't spectacular, it sounds like a very exciting event with all sorts of heavy precip culminating in a short duration heavy snowstorm/blizzard! It kind of seems like to me like a better version of March 2005-- remember that-- started as rain, temperatures crashed and it changed over to heavy snow. Another one which was like that (actually two) were the latter events in February 2010. Both started out as rain and changed to heavy snow, one changed right in the middle of the day and the other one later in the afternoon. Both gave us a foot of snow after we had had an inch of rain.

We spend billions putting up GOES satellites, why can't we spend some money on 4D Var?

Too bad we cant use that season as an analog since it was a weak el nino-- February 1969 was a fun month by all accounts!

wow 3.87 is a huge amount of precip....around here I don't believe we even got 2.00 total LE lol. That's even more than my GOAT storm which was January 2016 which was 3.00 LE here (all snow of course.)

For me it's the strong feeling that we've experienced the most extreme weather we are ever likely to experience in our lifetimes already, so anything we get from now on is just icing on the cake. Back in the 80s I would throw a fit if a storm busted, but after all we've seen in the past 20 years, it's all fine by me lol. No snow season will top 95-96 and no snowstorm will top January 2016 and we (hopefully) won't get anything like Hurricane Sandy ever again and the raging extreme heat we had in 2010 and 2011 will likely never again be experienced by us in our lifetimes either.

Looks like we're all been suffering from that southwesterly flow, which means the area between Erie and Buffalo does well but no one else. Same reason temperature departures are so high (both in the summer and the winter) even for areas far north of here (and SST too).

We had a raging blizzard on southerly winds in that storm lol

I like that our most historic storms are the ones we anticipate well in advance. I made a small list of the truly great ones (of any type) and wanted to research how far in advance they were predicted with reasonable accuracy. Here's my list in chronological order: 1 February 1978 2. April 1982 3. February 1983 4. Hurricane Gloria September 1985 5. Hurricane Bob August 1991 6. March 1993 7. January 1996 8. PD2 February 2003 9. December 2003 (including this for how early in the season it was for a foot plus blizzard) 10. February 2006 (only including this because of the huge totals in the city) 11. February 2010 (20 inches at NYC) 12. Boxing Day December 2010 13. January 2011 (19 inches at NYC) 14. Hurricane Sandy 15. January 2016 That's what I have so far in my list.