eduggs

Just a minor comment - triglycerides are not a form of cholesterol. They are lipids used to store excess carbs as fat. It's true that they will decrease if you reduce processed carbs and sugar intake. But they also sometimes increase in people who are trying to eat more healthily - particularly in people who increase consumption of vegetables and grains to compensate for a reduction in meat.

Nice job The 4 Seasons. Solid forecast and also great map of snowfall reports. Matches my hastily put together interpolation. NAM and eventually ECM did well. GFS, GEFS, RDPS, GEPS, and UK did not do well. The NYC area was in the bullseye for several days in the run-up... the NAM signaled over the last 36 hours that the jackpot area would end up northeast of the City, which proved correct. Ensembles were slow to respond and clung too tightly to the operational runs.

Snowy afternoon in the Taconics and Berks. +Sn reported at PSF. Looks like an easy 1-2" with more in the favored spots.

The subtropical jet has engaged periodically since early December, but mostly with a trof in the Southwest and typically leading to some kind of storm through the Lakes region. The Thurs-Fri event forecasted this week is a good example. I do agree about the likelihood of continued dry conditions.

Euro 264 hr

On today's models the cold returns after the 11th. But that's almost a week out. So things might not play out that way.

I do. That's why I mapped and posted the NWS reports. Just look at it. But if you just have to have a narrative summary for the event, I provided that too: A 1-5" event for the greater NYC metro with 6+ well north and east.

Pretty brutal to see zero forecast snowfall on the operational GFS, ECM, and GDPS out to 10 days in mid January with little to no help from the ensembles. There's really nothing even close to trackable right now. I hope and expect when the next event appears on the models it will do so unexpectedly.

This was not a "four to eight inch" snowstorm for the NYC area. The map of NWS snowfall reports visually describes the event quite well. Please stop perpetuating this fantasy. Facts matter.

Most of us were lucky last month to get a few minor snow events with cold temperatures and even a borderline moderate snowstorm despite the lack of any classic coastal low tracks. Now we are seeing some back luck with an unfavorable height field forecast out to the end of the mid-range during a peak snow climo period.

The OKX forecast zone is almost entirely NORTH and EAST of NYC. I plotted the NWS reports on the map I posted before. It shows the distribution of snowfall a lot better than the NWS PNS.

I was in Putnam County NY. This was NOT a 4-8" event in and around the NYC area. It was 1-5" with 6+ far north and east. It is important that we not create a false history.

Pattern Change is a made up concept. Every day is a unique atmospheric circulation. Sure we can identify characteristics of atmospheric circulations in real time and quantify them to create numerical indexes. But these are coarse numerical "descriptions." And none of this is very meaningful when focusing on snowfall, which is a local phenomenon and highly dependent on specific regional weather features. The bigger problem is that we cannot accurately forecast these patterns beyond 10 days. So 15 day ensemble mean charts are not very useful at identifying or forecasting weather patterns. At this very moment we can have little confidence in what the "pattern" will look like beyond next week.

We wish.

The GEFS have been shifting south for Friday night/Saturday (Jan 10). A few members take a surface low - possibly a secondary low - near or south of our region. A well timed shortwave in the northern stream might provide a just-suppressive enough flow to give us some wintry precipitation. It's kind of grasping at straws, but that's probably the next period to watch for a few runs even though this likely ends as some form of a cutter.

This event was 1" - 5" across the NYC metro - NOT 4" - 8".. See the circled area in the map of interpolated NWS snowfall reports below. The NWS OKX forecast area, which encompasses a large region NORTH and EAST of NYC, does not equate to the NYC metro. Don, your tables and stats are not representative or convincing, which disappoints me. A visual representation is helpful here. Even if you limit your analysis to a single 18z NAM run, it was the only model to correctly capture the sharp gradient through NYC.

Go back and check this. Look carefully at the maps I posted. The 18z NAM run right before the event was one of its least snowy runs. And it still showed 1-3" of (10:1) snow across Union (south) and Essex (north) Counties (EWR is right in between). Actual reports came in mostly in the 2-4" range including uncounted sleet, so about 1" off. Newark Airport at 4.3" was one of the highest reports for either county even though it's in the southern tip of Essex. The NAM was one of the few models to show sleet in Putnam County where I personally observed it. It also showed primarily sleet into Morris County before 9pm, which was also correct. It was the first and best model with the warm nose. The inv trof, which it also correctly showed lingering into Sat, was what delivered snow in NJ. I honestly think you guys arguing that the NAM did poorly are out of your minds.

Your numbers are slightly off since you didn't include the final 18z NAM total. "Newark" was 0.8, NYC was 2.6, Bridgeport was 5.8, and Islip was 5.0". Just a few additional tenths, but it matters. I suspect the annotated value for EWR is wrong. Since Newark is north of Staten Island, that should definitely be above 1" and likely close to the value for MMU. Is it even known where Pivotal pulls these values from? The 18z HRRR was obviously way off across our area. It's way too snowy in NJ and PA and it lacks the gradient that was observed across the LHV and Long Island. Any analysis showing that it performed better than the 18z NAM across this area is seriously flawed.

Not only did the NAM capture the gradient across our area better than all other models, it also correctly shifted north of the consensus days before the event. The ECM, for example, incorrectly still had snow in southern NJ overnight Thurs. As Don said, the NAM was an outlier during this time. BUT IT WAS CORRECT, which makes it even more impressive.

18z NAM (10:1) vs. interpolated and smoothed NWS reports (PHI, OKX, ALB, and BOS)

Don, where did you get your numbers for the 18z HRRR and NAM output? They don't match pivotal, so I assume you derived them somehow. But using what method? I don't think you responded to this question from earlier. To my knowledge, bufkit does not output snow/ice accumulations. Your tables also reinforce the false belief that weather models generate forecasted snowfall as output.

"Letter of the law" how so? All the data I've pored over supports the idea that the NAM performed best with QPF and ptype from about 3 days out until Friday afternoon. The ECM was probably second best with a late adjustment northeastward. The NAM was consistently 0.2 - 0.5" liquid across the NYC metro with a frozen ptype over its last few runs before the event. Despite "generous" final tallies for EWR and NYC, that's how it played out. It was best in the LHV, ENY, CT, and SNE. The ECM was too far southwest across the board. I'm not even sure how this is contentious. I feel like Don is/was biased against the NAM leading to a non-scientific and distorted assessment.

What are you basing this on? Can you share your data? My assessment does not match yours at all. I thought the NAM did great. The average of its last few runs before go time was more accurate than any other model IMO. It picked up on the track of the 700mb low and delaying its weakening. It correctly depicted the resulting dryslot across the southern tier of NY. It brought sleet past the NJ-NY border (correct). It was the first model to target and then consistently target the NJ-NY border as the dividing line between minor and significant snow, particularly with the initial overrunning. It (along with the RDPS) correctly highlighted the low-level lingering snowfall into Saturday that the globals undermodeled. Just overlaying its QPF forecast and clown maps with the reported snowfall matches up much better than everything else. The GFS, GEFS, CMC, RDPS, GEPS, HRRR, UK, ICON, and ICON-EPS were all consistently too far southwest with the heaviest precipitation, total snow, and all-snow zone. Even the ECM had too much snow in most of NJ until the very end. It also failed to show the gradient across Long Island. Hopefully you are relying on more than a single NAM run and a wonky bufkit output for one station.

I know you were forecasting for SNE, but in case anyone is looking outside that area, the "verification" map is significantly low in ALB's region. Those reports were not final.

I feel like you don't actually read what I write, which is a shame. Being an "old-school" poster, I put a lot of thought into what I write and it's often more than 280 characters. I thoroughly enjoyed the snow yesterday evening in Putnam County and then late last night in Morris County. I'm certainly not complaining. I'm trying to make a point about the NAM so that people are less likely to make the same mistake during the next event.