LibertyBell

Indeed! During our early 90s snow drought I went to the college library and went through the NY Times microfiche collection for that very reason. I picked winter 1966-67 to "relive" (or rather, experience for the first time, since my first weather memory is from the early 80s lol) to see what a prolonged snowy winter was actually like. I loved reading their forecasts, seeing their maps and pictures and seeing their stories of cold and snow, which to that point I had never experienced. All I had were the Blizzard of April 1982 and February 1983 which I also loved to read about during our long snow drought. Then for the first time I remember getting excited for snow in 1993, because the summer and fall temp patterns seemed to mimic 1966, and I thought a big winter might be oncoming, so I started keeping a weather journal for the first time in my life.

that sounds about right- they seem to be super sensitive when people criticize their pet model. To the media's credit, they seem to be pretty much ignoring the GFS now lol

yes yet another undermeasured storm at Central Park! the 60s were golden.....

what was the reason given for this so-called "upgrade" and why cant they just roll back to the previous version?

If no snow I'd just like to get an early spring and temps in the 80s and no rain for a few weeks lol. 1989-90 reboot

its rainy just like it is here. A friend in Norway told me they haven't had any snow there at sea level either.

I remember another snowless winter around here when parts of Israel got over a foot of snow!

Notice how it was consistently above 30 inches and close to 35 inches a year at NYC during the first several decades of that dataset.

funny thing is the standard deviation must be high since it's fairly uncommon around here to see winters close to the median or the mean, they're either much higher or much lower.

wow we supposedly had 5" here but I dont remember it at all, sounds like it was a really wet kind of snow? I guess Philly didn't get diddly as they ended up with a T for the entire season!

Don, is there a list of seasons with less than 10" seasonal snowfall somewhere? I want to see how they rank against each other.

so people are going to fall through the ice up there and die, just like they've been doing down here :-(

we got monster storms, but that was because we've been having wetter years, the winters haven't gotten colder. But if you want to talk about insects and ticks in winter, remember Feb 2018 I think it was, when we hit 80?!

Even stronger on the latest run (918 hPA)

whats the record for there, Chris? This last one was 944 there!

1000 trees down in the UK with Ciara (they officially name their major storms, which we should also be doing.) Pressure down to 944 hpa there, it was 970 when it passed through here.

Your measurements back my intuition. Also it seems that positive NAO during negative NAO cycles are more likely than negative NAO during positive NAO cycles. There's another factor that is tilted even more strongly towards less snow, which is that it isn't enough to have a negative NAO, you also need to have a west-based NAO. That probably lowers a favorable NAO pattern for snow to even less than 36%! We do have rare winters like 1960-61, 1993-94 and 2002-03 where you can get a lot of snow without the cooperation of a negative NAO though. The Pacific needs to be great, which it isn't right this winter. As per your sea ice data, is this the kind of extreme winter we're going to need to see normal sea ice coverage up north? In other words, how do you get a pattern where it's very cold up there AND very cold down here also? And when was the last time that happened, 1978-79? Also how does the sunspot cycle factor into your calculations. I am sure you are aware that we are going to reach the peak of the cycle next year, as we have extremely hot and dry summers every 11 years or so, going back to 1933, 1944, 1955, 1966, 1977, 1988, 1999, 2010, so the next one would be in 2021. Do you think the SE Ridge flexing its muscles so strongly this winter is an early sign of the upcoming summer and especially Summer 2021 being extremely hot and dry (we get those 11 year peak heat summers with triple digit highs because the summers are dry as well as hot, a lot of rain would mute the highs.)

the 30 incher with 100 mph winds in NFLD was amazing too, it looked like Sapporo, Japan there with 15 ft snow drifts creating snow tunnels that cars had to drive through

the biggest storm I can recall was that overperforming SWFE that didn't change to rain until the end, we got 2.5-3 inches here with that one.

yea I dont know the snow physics down south but even Atlanta got measurable snow over the weekend. They dont seem to be as track dependent as we are, probably because we have an annoying ocean just to our south. Think about it, no storm track has passed to our south this entire winter. Every single storm has tracked to our north!

2015-16 was a veritable snow and cold paradise compared to this winter lol.

I wonder what they didn't get that we got?

why are these mild patterns so stable and last for months while cold snowy patterns only last a few weeks at most? 2010-11 is celebrated as a prolonged cold and snowy winter and it was pretty much just a 5 week deal. And in 1995-96 we were in and out of cold and snowy weather. Never in my memory did we have a cold snowy pattern that was anywhere close to how mild and snowless this winter has been or the likes of 1972-73, 1989-90, 1997-98, 2001-02, etc.

a la 1989-90. what a sucky winter that was- cold dry December, record warm Jan Feb Mar and an insignificant snowfall in early April lol.

Thanks! I saw some very interesting predictions for temp patterns going forward. Basically, we are warming from the pole "downwards" in that the greatest positive anomalies are occurring the further northward you go. Northern VT is projected to be about 10 degrees F warmer by 2070? At 40 N latitude on the east coast this is projected to be about 5.5 degrees F warmer.