Scarlet Pimpernel

10 hours ago, Bob Chill said:

Feeling pretty good. Second kid graduated from UMD tonight. Two down and 2 to go. Once the second set is in college it's time to sell the house in Rockville and move to Parrs ridge (not joking). Can't wait to post storm obs. Lol 

Well, my daughter is a junior in HS this year, so I get to start worrying about college real soon myself!!

(ETA:  And congrats on your 2nd kid graduating UMD!!  Very cool!! )

10 hours ago, WxWatcher007 said:

 

I can sense the Panic spreading. Reservations are increasing by the day.

I can't wait to roll up into the Eskimo Joe Memorial Ballroom at The Panic Room for my next batch of Reapin's like

I can't tell...is that a skeletal Michael Jackson in "Thriller", or John Travolta a'la "Saturday Night Fever"???

Not sure Eskimo Joe can match moves like that...

I found a photo of the Reaper here in the Redemption Room recently...though it was rain, not snow! 

(ETA:  I use this as a joke, but an awesome movie!!  One of my all-time favorites, and too bad Morgan Freeman didn't get an Oscar for his performance in "Shawshank Redemption"!!  In fact, too bad that movie didn't earn any despite several nominations.)

1 hour ago, Mrs.J said:

Wow watching the tornado outbreak in LA, MS, AL, TN on Weather Nation. Large damaging and popping up all over. 

I had seen the watches/warnings in that area earlier and it looked rough...didn't realize it was getting *that* bad...oy!

3 hours ago, Bob Chill said:

Road spray from the brine is salting the air and dropping the freezing point into the upper 20s. 

My dark blue Honda Civic will probably turn grayish at some point by tomorrow!!  Just like it does every winter...

2 hours ago, JakkelWx said:

It was a fun december. Fun Christmas coming up with t shirts and shorts! Looks like I'm back on the watchlist 

36 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

Gfs shows the path to a white Xmas miracle. 

Miracle on K Street!!

5 hours ago, mappy said:

im really glad we are getting all this worthless discussion stuff out of the way early in the season. 

C'mon...you know how this place works!  There's always room for worthless discussion, it's never "out of the way"!!

31 minutes ago, NorthArlington101 said:

I think I heard (jokingly, I'm sure ) that HDRPS maps are banned. 18z HDRPS is gonna be the best run of the 18z suite, bands DC-Balt pretty hard. 2-4" type run for areas that get hit, temps cooperate because of the banding.

I heard that Jeb runs that model...

(And I say that all in good fun, Jeb!!)

23 minutes ago, Bob Chill said:

It does and we use the term loosely to describe any blocking low pressure near the martimes. The one in question is transient and on the move. 

A true classic 50/50 is held in place by a -NAO and that's how we typically get the really big storms but we've had many events work out with transient ones. 

If I recall correctly, I believe the January 2016 blizzard benefited from a "bootleg" transient 50/50 at the time...so yeah, we can get those to work out (though good storms don't necessarily have to be as big as that event)!  But as you say, a classic 50/50 -NAO is more stable...PD-II and our troika of HECS in 2009-10 are examples of the more classic -NAO events.

1 minute ago, Skywalker03 said:

Learning question:  Does 50/50 refer to longitude/latitude?  If so, doesn't that map show a 50/70 L?  If I understand correctly, we want a strong system there because it funnels cold air into our area, right?

Pretty much...general area of lat/lon, 50N/50W, that you'd want a large closed low at 500-mb (maybe a bit farther west than 50W, but 50/50 sounds better!).  Classic location to get confluent flow over the northeast US, which funnels cold air down, and keeps a large, cold high in place (a'la cold air damming along the Appalachians).  This effectively blocks any approaching surface low from "cutting" off to our west and northwest, and enables coastal low formation.  Without some kind of 50/50, even a cold, strong high will just drift off to the east or northeast, a strong enough low will cut, and we'd end up with mostly rain or all rain.

Well...a dusting of snow, or a light crust, is really all I expect where I'm at.  But cannot say I'm disappointed in any way.  Will at least get on the board somewhat, unlike last December.  It will still be an impressive temperature drop and tomorrow will be a rude awakening after 50s today.  Heh...maybe it will give me a chance to dust off the brush/scraper for the car tomorrow morning (if I can find it and dig the darned thing out)!!

18 minutes ago, Chris78 said:

What positive is is comes in at night which should help some.

But we're heading toward a full moon this week, and it will be at a high angle.  Things to consider.  The thick cloud cover might help though. 

4 hours ago, H2O said:

whats worse is people using the thread, that explains the effort to limit complaining, to complain about the complaining and tell the people trying to limit the complaining how to limit complaining.

Your complaint is noted! 

13 minutes ago, Bob Chill said:

I'm digging how guidance is shifting towards a more broad conus trough down the line instead of a vertical ridge/trough setup. The broader the trough axis the more chances we get for a widespread event instead of praying for a perfectly timed shortwave to round the base and praying even harder that the 100 mile wide swath of precip makes it over our yards. Lets have a big drawn out overrunning event that plasters the TN valley and MA. 

Funny, but as I was reading the first part of your post quoted here, after looking at the GFS (and GEFS) 500-mb plot...my first thought was "ohhh, overrunning would be nice with that look!"  Two minds and all that, right?  Anyhow, yeah, such an event would be great, as long as we avoid a hugely amplified wave I suppose (not much blocking).  I know we're talking fantasy land time range at this point, but still.

1 hour ago, North Balti Zen said:

Every time Ji and Eskimo Joe find each other in the winter to complain it’s like the key master and gatekeeper finding each other in Ghostbusters. 
 

Now Gozer the Traveler has to come. There’s gonna be a StaPuft marshmallow man striding up 95 between the beltways.

Dogs and cats living together...mass hysteria!!

33 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

But I heard we’re in a shutout pattern. 

I say that every year during the Cleveland Indians' opening game!

27 minutes ago, C.A.P.E. said:

Well, it is the very first red flag, apparently!

Concern abounds. Luckily the Panic room is only a few steps away. Even a drunk can manage to stagger his way there.

But the Panic Room has kicked it up a few notches this year!  Just look at some of those resorts the Reaper invested in!

2 hours ago, leesburg 04 said:

Boy the eagles suck

Not as much as the Browns!!   (this is coming from a native of northeast Ohio!)

42 minutes ago, Bob Chill said:

Long range looks like perfectly typical early winter in these parts. Not too warm, not too cold, and not snowy without a fluke. As we move later into the year, the same type of pattern has an easier time working out in some fashion.

For now we just sit back and wait. Prob for at least 2 weeks. 

Exactly.  Which is why I'm more or less in your camp, just sit back and see how things go.  As long as it's not looking like wall-to-wall crap in the longer range, we should be OK.  At this point in the month (only the 1st!), I'm not overly enthused nor am I concerned.  Like I said...and as you've mentioned many times..."good" snow in the 1st half of December is climatologically not exactly the easiest in any year (barring something extreme like 2009).  I tend to pay more attention as we get toward Christmas, when the medium range is getting into the last part of the month and first part of January.  And you're absolutely correct, the same kind of pattern later in the month is easier to produce something snowy than it is now.  A bit more forgiving, as it were.  We don't require quite so much deviation from climo by then.

7 hours ago, Ralph Wiggum said:

Thru 240 on the EPS/GEFS/GEPS pattern isnt terrible. AO looks to go from positive back to neutral then negative. PNA starts then ends positive. Big EPO ridge...Aleutian low. Atl side is meh imo...nothing too exciting yet no major red flags either. Would be nice to get the NAO ridge to work in tandem with the favorable PAC teleconnections but maybe as we move thru the month.  Again, thru day 10 no significant concerns and certainly not a shutout look. And that takes us closer to mid Dec so no complaints. Those day 10+ progs with collapsing patterns and PAC air flooding the US keep being pushed back for now.

1 hour ago, Ralph Wiggum said:

First red flag on the EPS....day 10 screaming PAC jet into the West coast....western US and Canada flooding with PAC air. Rather get it out of the way now I suppose. Many pros seem to think big changes for the better are coming later in Dec.

One might get whiplash from these two contrasting posts...a mere few hours apart (and apologies...sort of...for singling yours out!)!  But seriously, having not followed much so far as we get into winter, it's hard to make too much of anything one way or another as this month progresses.  And hope that's right about better changes later in the month.  I think the general consensus from what I gleaned reading in here lately is that we'll have a period of "not so great" after this week, but perhaps transitioning into better later in the month.  Maybe I misinterpreted that, but it's the sense I got.  As long as we don't end up with week after week after week of "Pac Puke" like last year (phrase compliments of Bob Chill!), and then have to waste more weeks "recovering" from that!  Or another Christmas Eve like 2015, where it was actually uncomfortably humid and damp.  Lately, snow in December around these parts seems almost like a bonus.  Even a small amount.

Good news is, maybe even if it's relatively mild, I can get a few miles of bike riding in now and then before we go full Jebman with extreme cold and deep snow pack (and of course I'd root for that)!! 

16 minutes ago, Bob Chill said:

For reasons that nobody really knows for sure... the NAO has an embedded decadal or multi-decadal cycle. It's streaky over longer time scales. Obvioulsy we've been experiencing the bad streak lately and luckily "stole" 2 damn good winters during this big +NAO streak. What made the 2013-15 stretch so special (and unusual) was the # of snow events.

I'm way too lazy to look it up but I'm pretty much 100% sure you will find few if any winters in the last 100 years that featured a strongly + NAO and 10 or more snow events. It was a remarkable stretch that will probably never happen again in my lifetime. It's not like we need some raging -nao to get snowfall but that stretch was raging positive. From a wx enthusiast perspective, those back to back winters should be at the top of the anomalous/unusual list. 

I'm really hoping current guidance is a sign that the bad streak is over. A -nao really helps with marginal setups and tricky stromtracks. We don't even need below normal temps in the heart of winter to get snow with a nice stormtrack. Cutters can still happen with a -nao but even with those have a much better shot of front end snowfall when HP is doing like 90mph NE into the Atlantic. I'm really sick of cold high pressures running away all winter.  

One reason why 2013-14 is way up there on my list of winters...in the years that I've been here, at least (since 2001).  Depending on the day and how I feel, I rate that winter as better even than 2002-03, despite the KU event that February.  Yeah, I know, it's sacrilege to declare anything other than '09-10 better than '02-03, but you know what I mean.  Not a single KU event in '13-14, and only one event that scored a foot-plus where I'm at (in Feb. 2014), but the sheer number of moderate or better events was astonishing.  Especially given the overall winter pattern that season.  Not to mention how late in the season we got those.

I'd argue we can do well with a "bootleg" -NAO too, like the Blizzard of 2016.  A small precursor clipper helped "keep it in place" just long enough to deliver that two days later.  But there's always an element of luck there, too.  (ETA:  And that blizzard occurred after a gut-punching warm December that was +11 on the month!!).

On 11/11/2019 at 7:25 PM, WxWatcher007 said:

I’ll be waiting for your call.

 

Lazy ass, sleeping on the job!   Geez, it's all gotta be automated now!!

4 hours ago, mappy said:

if it makes you feel better, i had a coworker call and ask me to define twilight and when it shows up. apparently being the office weather nerd means i also must explain sunrise/sunsets and how light refracts across the earth. 

Ha!  For some reason this reminds me of something I read years ago.  The basic story was that this one guy who was working at some factory while on summer break from "University" (he was British, yes).  Apparently he was working with someone who was not very bright and kind of obnoxious, and was having trouble loosening one of these large bolts from a nut.  The "university" guy kindly offered advice to heat it so that the nut would expand and break free more easily.  The "not very bright" guy was a bit put off and said "Oh, so things get bigger when they get hotter, eh??"  To which "university" responded sarcastically, "Yeah, that's why the days are longer in summer than they are in winter"...and Mr. "not very bright's" face looked puzzled for a moment, then cleared as he apparently bought it!!

Thanks for this, WxUSAF.  In a way, kind of sad we actually need this kind of notice, but given the past couple or so winters it's necessary.  I'm reminded of Bob's similar post at some point (2 winters ago?  I've lost track!).  The medium range threads really did get to be a chore to slog through at times, to the point of being unreadable.  The panic room thread is great, because it's nice for people to vent in there or be snarky, and also just make fun of it all when the going is tough (Thanks, WxWatcher007/Reaper)!

So yeah, with that, just have to take things how they go, even if it's not easy.  As frustrating as it can be when it's not going well, I still try to at least get some understanding from a scientific/meteorological standpoint as to why events happened as they did (because the geek in me still is interested in that!).  I have zero expectation one way or another on this upcoming winter season, given some of the discussion I've seen.  Looks like too many factors on either side to make a set determination...so whatever!