eduggs

We're all tired of looking for threats out past day 7. We need something trackable inside of day 5. Otherwise it's hard to believe it's real.

Of course. But some of my most memorable snow events were things like forecasted rain that morphed into 5" of mashed potatoes with thunder, a forecast of scattered snow showers that turned into a localized norlun trof pounding, or even the expectation of cold and dry interrupted by white out snow squalls. Snow happiness is maximized when an event overperforms.

I think these are the best. Unexpected daytime snow that accumulates and sticks around. The expectations game is everything.

The 0z op GFS shows why it can be so frustrating to get excited about a favorable looking "pattern."

The next 10 days look great on the mean H5 anomaly charts, but we're still going to need some luck getting all the pieces aligned favorably.

Produces a respectable light snow event. But I still hope that's not close to the final outcome for that period. There's a lot of potential, but this run there's mostly wave interference and mistiming. We could use more southern stream involvement.

The RGEM output looks fine. But TT is hitting the sauce.

So was this a Miller A or B?

There are already many other variants that developed after Omicron. When you have 2 million cases per day worldwide, you have a lot of potential mutations. There's no reason to believe Omicron will be the last variant to spread widely around the word. Hopefully the next major variant will be even less deadly and also less contagious. I also hope we have the capacity to rapidly adjust existing vaccines to any new variants that appear, which might be more deadly.

We should probably ignore the GFS day 15 QPF map for now.

The 12z UK was moving in this direction. Got precipitation to most of SNE. The EC wasn't too far off aloft, but ultimately well offshore.

On the 18z GFS, there is a little piece of energy that escapes the stagnant cutoff off Baja CA and slowly slides east and is near the TX panhandle on day 3. This shortwave and little packet of vorticity makes it just far enough east to be on the downstream side of an approaching shortwave in the northern stream, allowing it to phase and help initiate a negative tilt to the trof. It's a pretty spectacular progression. But it also seems like if this piece of energy is late or something else is off slightly, the trof is likely to end up too far SE. This was a fun run though!

I remember a retrograding storm like that maybe 25 years ago. It brought warning snows throughout SNE and an inch or two back to NYC at the tail end. These rarely work out. The longshot potential has been signaled for a few days now, notably by this afternoon's UKMET. This GFS run further depicts the potential realization of that potential. If this threat has legs, it will add many additional days to our model watching.

959mb over Portland, ME. Lock it.

Looking at operational run snow maps out past day 7 is asking for disappointment... past day 10 is masochistic.

All globals - EC, GFS, UK, CMC - look interesting over the next 10 days. The UK actually wraps precipitation back into most of SNE and LI with the Thurs - Fri wave. But any impact from this in our region is probably very low likelihood. There should be a few threats to track thereafter, and possibly some slower, longer duration threats.

Thursday looks mildly interesting for a longshot event. Kind of a retrograding coastal scenario. Nice high amplitude trof but too far southeast for a change! I guess there's still time for that to evolve differently, but that seems unlikely based on ensembles. That trof looks like it affects the followup trof, which looks like the better precipitation threat for next weekend. I like the amplitude and orientation of the jet through the next 10 days. Storms that develop also probably won't be speeding along as fast as the last one. Now we wait for a favorable buckle. I would be thrilled with a series of minor snow events while we look forward to a big one in a pattern where it is possible. We could also come up completely empty if nothing breaks right. There are no slam dunks for NYC snow lovers.

Couple counterpoints: 1. Measuring snow in the past may have been more about final snow depth than total accumulated snow. 2. We have way more observations nowadays than in decades past because of the internet, twitter, and weather forums etc. If we only had a few underreporting stations... NY Central Park, Logan etc... a lot of us would never know when places like Mt. Tolland randomly hit double digits. My suspicion is that it hasn't changed so much overall - we're just better at detecting the weenie jackpot areas. It's also possible that storms are a little more juiced up because of a slightly warmer climate. I'm just not so sure we would recognize this without statistical study.

Will is one of the few on here whom I almost never disagree with. I still would have weenie tagged him when he mentioned it... at least briefly

Definitely not not. I also think anybody mentioning convection and SLP placement should be insta-weenie tagged. That's high on the list of wishcasting obsessions.

Great post. The last few GFS runs probably ended up being too wet. People love to complain about the models being inconsistent, but I thought the GFS - and guidance in general - was very consistent with both the placement and magnitude of precipitation, especially within about 72 hours. Contrary to what most people will remember, this was a late developing storm that dumped most of its precipitation in the Gulf of Maine and the Maritimes. It did not end up significantly stronger or NW of where it was modeled several days ago. But it also clearly had a major impact because it didn't go OTS as a few model runs suggested several days ago. In the end, the high snow to liquid ratios resulted in a big overperforming snowstorm from NYC to BOS! A few people who called for big snow totals were right, but possibly not for the reasons that they thought.

The Euro doesn't forecast snow. I forecasts liquid equivalent precipitation. Last night's Euro had about .38" for Southington, CT. Hartford reported 0.34" and New Haven reported 0.31". That seems low, but that's what their station data shows. Do you know how much melted liquid precipitation you received there?

None of the reporting stations in CT or EMA have recorded big liquid equivalent numbers. Maybe they underreport, I don't know. But at least in the NYC area, spotter reports and NWS measurements are showing 15:1 to 20:1 ratios.

It's a popular hobby to shit on the models. I'm just trying to counter that with factual observations. A positive snowfall bust does not necessarily mean a model bust.

Might be. No argument there. But the end result looks reasonable. There would have been a lot of disappointed weenies in NYC and CT if this storm had come in with standard 10:1 ratios.