Cobalt

Haha no worries. I'd imagine that will certainly be useful at some point, since a fair bit of images from that timeframe were taken down to conserve file space. For now I'm going to focus on pre-AmWX events, since most of our events following that are entirely intact. 09-10 and earlier are a completely different story.

Looking into the thread that MN Transplant linked is honestly incredibly sad. The death of that abundance of information during potentially the best wintry period of our natural lives (also one I happened to not remember due to age, how foolish!) adds insult to injury. I'm mainly revisiting this because of this winters' end, since the offseason feels like a good period of time to attempt to reconstruct information from winters' past. There does seem to be a period of archival from the Wayback Machine which shows what the page looked like just hours before onset of Feb 5 blizzard. In fact, the main link that connects us to that snapshot happens to also show the radar imagery. I find this incredibly ominous, tbh. It's completely frozen in time, which adds to the mysteriousness of the lost information, yet it still shows the onset of a once-in-a-lifetime stretch of snow. Past that, the Weather Forecasting and Discussion board hosts the most promise: http://web.archive.org/web/20100204094738/http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?showforum=15 Here, some of the threads actually do work. Even if the images appear to be dead (except for some), the content of these posts still does happen to exist. The most captivating one to me was @donsutherland1's analysis of similar ENSO and blocking periods. Others here might remember that well, but it is just purely fascinating to see the synoptic view of what was to come. That can be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20100130093856/http://www.easternuswx.com/bb/index.php?showtopic=219983 Outside of that however.. things came up dry. Attempting to utilize the Wayback Machines' page saving feature fell just short. It was close, and in fact the only thing separating me from accessing some of the individual OBS threads was a few errors.. if I were more tech savvy I would've pushed further, but for now it's not viable. Perhaps a different tool can be utilized to revive those half-dead links. There's still some pages of interest to be found there. It's kind of comedic though, since the OBS threads from Feb 10-12 (based on a snapshot from Feb 12) exist. Yet, it seems like everything from Feb 5 to early Feb 10 is MIA. It's a real shame, but not much can be done. If anyone wants to explore the links to see if they can find anything interesting, it's posted above. Not expecting much out of it. The idea of trying to reconstruct it was started off by me as a 14 year old weenie, so obviously that excitement of reminiscing has calmed down just a bit. The archival on this board doesn't make sense either given that the file limit constrains everything, but perhaps it can be done elsewhere. Just goes to show that everything that can be found on the internet is permanent.. until it isn't.

^ another fun stat for the past 5 years is that Richmond has surpassed DCA for snowfall 4 out of 5 times. I believe they might've done the same in 10-11, 11-12, and even 12-13 too (I can't find the page to back that up but that's what I remember seeing). So that's seven out of the past eleven years where Richmond has outmatched DCA in snowfall. Some of that has to be attributed to bad luck, but the rest? I'm not too sure. So in short, we're a glorified Richmond climate with the caveat that we luck our way into a 20" snowfall every decade or so. Nice lol.

I remember Chuck posted a series of maps for winters following the 97-98 (and 72-73 I think?) Nino(s). We sort of pushed it aside because Chuck, but perhaps it could be argued that the wake of a Super Nino causes long term effects for our PAC wrt hostility? I need to find where he posted it, but they looked pretty similar to what we've been dealing with.

Substitute the bacon with pepperoni (or maybe have them both?) and you can count me in. Been eating well but the picture you just painted in my head might get me to break that temporarily lol. Also yes, not much drinking going on here. I've only ever had anything at special occasions, but I don't really have a taste for it yet. In terms of general drink-worthy occasions, I wonder which would come first.. a major DC sports title, me turning 21, or an area-wide HECS? Place your bets I guess, but only one of those is most nearly a certainty (I hope at least), but yeah, I can wait to drink. My family is full-on Portuguese so I can only safely say that I'd enjoy various wines anywho. Beer drinking doesn't exactly run in those genes.

0z Euro at least keeps things interesting for next weekend? Slightly better ridge to the west coupled with a slightly farther W trough. It's still an OTS miss but this run it was a 986 mb low 200-300 miles from where we'd want it. 12z had a ~1005mb lp 500+ miles offshore. Still substantially far out so it's at least of interest.

I'll take a stab at this (I'm likely wrong but I recall seeing this idea floated around), but the Feb 16 storm was initially our storm window. It looked to be our classic HA event with cold air on tap as well (up until the Thursday before the EPS was advertising pretty cold temps out ahead). However at like 90hrs out guidance picked up on a wave that went across the boundary that was set up just to the west of us, which didn't allow the cold air to filter through our area. By the time that storm passed through on Sunday, the Tuesday system was doomed to ride that boundary as well and cut. Thursday's event ended up being a pretty similar setup, but the NAO was already positive by that point (instead of flipping to positive during that event like it would've on Tuesday), and the trough was too far west, etc. Someone can correct me on this, but I remember someone (PSU??) pointing out that the cold air source from the TPV would've been way more favorable on that Tuesday, but allowing it to get stale for 2 days longer certainly didn't help, as well as the teleconnections being slightly less favorable.

hmmm

Awesome, exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks!

Hey, does anyone know where I can find snow spotter reports/spotter maps from 2015 and before? Checking on the official LWX page only has it go back to the March 5 2015 event for some reason. I could've sworn it had events before that too, but it must've updated. I'm asking mainly because I'm trying to reconstruct some of the snowfalls from that period, as I only started keeping track in March of that year. Thanks in advance!

I remember trying to sleep through the derecho, without much success. I had already gotten a lot out of the winter weather side of things at that age, but losing power for 7 days didn't give my young weather weenie self the same connection to severe season. However, I'd love to get into that side of things, but I'll probably just be around lurking. Would be nice to track without the cutthroat nature of the winter threads, that's for sure.

Summer of the 17 year cicadas coupled with the 10 year anniversaries of Irene and the M 5.8 earthquake.. shit is about to go down

Really? I see 6.4" from that event in BWI. But yeah, it didn't all fall in a 12hr period like the warning criteria says, so I guess it isn't a true warning event for there. 4.6" for March 21 2018 which is barely off the mark there.

Guidance being wayy too excited with precip hasn't helped either for sure. In some cases it hasn't been close. Most if not all guidance had 0.8-1" QPF with last Thursday's system from the DC metro up through your way, with a fair bit of it falling when the column should've been supportive of at least partly if not mostly snow (4-9am). Instead all that precip with the initial impulse of snow went north of us, and I'm not sure either of our areas got even half as much QPF as most guidance showed.

I remember the NAM showing a medium sized event for most of the area up until 6z the day of, where it showed something like 6-10" with a jackpot near DC. I glanced at it before heading to bed pretty skeptical, but it doubled down on 12z with a jackpot of like 12-18". Wasn't as insane as that, but still a super memorable storm. The unicorn pattern long range models had been pushing might've not set up shortly after that event, but that still was a pretty decent winter for most. Surprised to see that McLean got 5.5" during that February. Even more surprising given that so far this month I've tallied 6.2", which takes the crown of most snow in February since at least Feb 2015 here. Also 4th snowiest month since I started keeping track starting in March of 2015 which is.. kind of just sad lol.

Yeah, this. Our only shot at a clean event was wave 2 of the Feb 10-12 timeframe, and that one completely clipped us. Final maps for the year will be pretty telling. Payback for Jan 11-13 2019 maybe?

Incredible stuff. Gives me a few more ideas as to where I might move after my college years haha. Seems like that HRRR is somewhat optimistic of having a temporary flip back to snow for areas just NW of DC. 3k NAM has it in an incredibly isolated spot, but backend flakes would still be nice, even if non accumulating.

Wow, impressive! Must look like deep winter out there. You guys have been on a heater ever since Jan 31st. Like your own personal ending to 14'-'15 up there (minus the arctic cold :p). Not sure how much we got in McLean before an icy/rainy mix took it away, but I'll check with spotter reports later. 32F right now.

I recall you mentioned that it seems like this change suddenly became more prevalent after our Super Nino. This is a rather novice question, but would a strong Nina help change some of that PAC forcing? Or is that pattern just being more amplified by our current base state?

That's honestly the biggest fail of all. Since the late Jan 2019 cold outbreak the core of basically every arctic blast has been to the west of us, or nowhere at all. I'd imagine part of the cold busting this weekend is also because not many areas in and near DC retained any form of snow/sleet cover from the Thursday system. In any case, 35 degrees here in McLean. Still some patches of snow on the ground near shade, some of which have been around since Jan 31st. It's pretty rare to keep snow patches around like that for that long here, especially considering that we've had more days above 50 these past 3 weeks than nights below 20. Interesting stuff.

Doesn't help that NAM has the onset directly at 1PM. Compare the simulated radar for the NAM vs GFS, that 6 hour difference changes a lot.

Legit waterfall running alongside the house atm. If the hard refreeze kicks in quickly it'll probably get super slick real fast. Ground cover that's outside of the sun's view is still solid though. Sun angle for the win!

This honestly might be the most impressive DC'ing I've ever seen. A stat which features the company of not only 2010, but also 2003 and 1899 in the department of accumulating snowfall events, in February no less! Without much context that looks incredibly encouraging, but obviously fails to meet that mark lol. How would we have reacted if before this winter we were told that DC would have tallied more accumulating snow events in the month of February than 2010??

I unfortunately feel like we're heading into a grey area between both Spring and wintry threats for DC. Not getting invested in next week's threat, but at the same time the GFS has 0 days above 60 through the entire run. Ugh.

Precip maps show 0.5-0.8" of precip during that time. Based on essentially every single system we've had this past year, I'll take the under on half of that lol.