BooneWX

Just have to endure a week or two of it at most and then it won’t rain a drop for 6 more weeks.

I can see we’re going to do this thing again where we don’t have normal rain ever. Feast or famine. Wildfires or flood stage. Nothing in between.

MJO wins 9/10. Our perception of climo has been harshly driven by never leaving phases 4-7 for years.

I don’t think the maps are out yet but track and evolution wise, not much has changed from previous runs.

Admittedly worried that this is more of an ice look (for now) than snow south of VA. You’ve got plenty of cold air to tap from the north and I know we don’t live at the 500mb level but man that ridge is going to do its thing unless you’ve got a really robust high in the correct position. Trending better the past few days on blocking should help but there will be a fine line between big ice and big snow. Unfortunately, cad areas are just as due - if not more, for the former than the latter.

The GFS wasn’t done

Really interested to see if our EPS uptick continues

GFS is a decent CAD region hit. Notably, it trended SE from its 6z run.

Also, optimism should be higher. So many think Feb snow is impossible and I just watched oil rigs in the Gulf get buried not even 2 weeks ago. It’s been a weird winter. Anything is on the table, including 80s this week and snow next.

It’s doing that thing again - the thing where it doesn’t move an inch for endless amounts of runs. More indicative of the performance we saw with the early Jan storm. It didn’t nail amounts but it did nail evolution and track.

lol it did last storm

I like where we sit for now

Haven’t had a chance to digest the 18z data but my biggest takeaway from the 12z was the EPS steadily increasing amounts again for the CAD regions. Of anything at D9/10, that’s the one thing I’d prefer to have in my corner. Anything else is noise at this range.

I’ll say this. Living in the foothills for most of my life, when we do get a big storm, the signal usually starts around D9/10 and only progresses louder. That doesn’t mean to say it happens often, but when it does, it’s rarely something that starts coming together 3/4 days out.

Ironically I did, just in case lol. I felt like winter was probably coming back but I also remembered last year when I thought that and proceeded to have a crabgrass invasion by late March. Lowe’s has 0-0-7 50lb bags for $37 in case anyone wants to snag some.

My god what a GFS run. Might save that for the archive.

Euro AI casually dropping feet on the foothills overnight lol. It does seem like next week has some legs.

Fab Feb is loading….

MJO, climatology, and everything else aside, one thing that’s very different than past February’s is the fact that we have cold on this side of the globe. If we get another episode of a stretched PV + the ridge bridge shown on some of the modeling over the arctic, we’ll be in the freezer. Maybe not the January freezer but cold nonetheless.

The models are coming around a bit today as @Daniel Boonealluded to. The background state is the background state and for once, it’s a cold one. I still think persistent cold will be a lot more challenging this time around but I also think a more extreme gradient between warm and cold could pay off with the storm track for some.

I would’ve given it a D or F many years ago but I’m not sure averages are relevant anymore. We’re clearly in a different weather era for the south and I truly think our old climatology moved north by a few states boardwide, years ago.

If this is the end of the prime winter weather stretch, so be it. I hate we all didn’t match the cold and moisture more often but truthfully, we’ve had almost wall to wall cold since Thanksgiving except for a mild thaw around Christmas. It’s bound to flip and it’s very hard to piece together a third month when you’ve had almost 2 perfect months in the south. I still think we’ll have shots and a volatile month but extended cold like we had in January is probably going to be hard to come by. Oceanic temps in the Enso region show a more established La Niña and that’s a harbinger of the SER being a dominate feature as we migrate towards spring. Winter grade to now: Cold/feels like winter: A+ Moisture: D overall: C+. Snowless streak broken imby and for many. An improvement from the F winters of late. Long term hope: La Niña trends to neutral and we get a very weak Nino next winter. I’m worried about spring and summer in the meantime. For many on this board, Helene left a mess that won’t be cleaned up in the forests and woods. A drought would be very bad news.

Another reason why I think this will be more of a thaw than a torch.

A rare chance to avoid all of the crappy MJO phases is upon us

The models are speeding up the transition back to cold. Looks like a torch lite until the end of the first week of Feb but the -EPO has a little more winter for us.