Henry's Weather

I call it “biblical traffic”. Yeah, that was one hell of a commute back. We got through 5 episodes of the S-Town podcast during the latter half of the commute, for some perspective. Some of my friends opted to perch out the window and smoke cigarettes during the crawl. Was a pretty all-American day for us, and one that I won’t forget ever.

I was almost certainly in the same exact traffic jam - we left Groveton NH at around 4:30 and arrived in Cambridge at 2 AM

Woah… how did we start arguing about the senate?

Off topic, but what benefits do you get from running?

Atlantic optimal, pacific suboptimal, especially considering CC decrease in baroclinicity. Accurate summary?

I’d be a fool to expect otherwise, but there does exist some opportunity for an event somewhere. Obvious caveat: it is April, chances of something appreciable in SNE are sub 5%

Big neg NAO reducing, PNA pumping. There’s a shot at something for sure

Ho lee shit

This is a dumb tweet

Pulling for ya

Valid point, but if you had used 1950-2011 data, this would be all red.

Right, it’s not that people can’t want outcomes. It’s that logical discourse allows us to find which outcomes are actually most likely. Argumentation needs to have primary salience for why someone thinks something is going to happen. Otherwise, the scientific enterprise is not happening, for better or for worse. God, this conversation makes me want to start a blog a la @weatherwizand others. Just some sort of objective metric.

From an intellectual basis, sure, but calling a winter storm window and receiving a KU during that window must also be immensely gratifying. But sure, ideally you would nest the correct sensible weather prediction in an accurate assessment of the long-wave pattern and its flux

I personally think it’s better to make predictions and see how they fare against reality than to never make predictions because of the inevitability of being wrong in some way. I think more is learned from trial and error than no trial at all. I think it’s a trait related to psychological conscientiousness, if I had to speculate

There’s hardly any satisfaction in predicting an index mean, when it doesn’t pertain to sensible weather outcomes

There is so much that gets lost along the chain of large-scale synoptic facts -> small-scale sensible weather impact. I think what is keeping you making these outcome-specific forecasts is the high from predicting the specifics pretty accurately for 2014-15, 2015-16, and 2017-18. That sort of intellectual satisfaction is highly appealing.

People hate on pessimists not because they’re wrong (since a lack of significant wintry weather is always more likely than significant wintry weather), but because their bias is clear, and because it is also clear that they relish the negative response from the hopefuls. Two facts: people who post here hope for snow. And, snow events are becoming more infrequent. Therefore, performative, inert pessimism is more accurate than naive optimism over the long run. However, since the realities I mentioned above are already implicit in this endeavor, dispositional pessimists, though they end up being right more often, are “raining on this particular parade”. To extend the analogy, you don’t have to go to a Red Sox bar with a Yankees cap on, even if the reality of the game is independent of what clothes you wear. The truth is: recreational weather discussion is motivated by hope for certain outcomes, and doomers will frequently “wear the hat” of the objective observer to rile up the subjective hopefuls, but often these people, like @jbenedet, make woeful predictions to serve the God of pessimism. The motivation becomes to frustrate the hopefuls, not to make correct forecasts. It is possible to be a pessimist and also hold yourself to an objective standard of truth. The same is true for optimists or hopefuls. The reason why @40/70 Benchmark gets more respect on this board than someone like Omega or the Pope is because he releases outlooks and then grades himself on how accurate they were, even if it is clear that he wants a specific outcome.

The lord giveth fresh produce and terrible iced tea, amen. Lord, may your boughs be plentiful, may your aisles be bursting, may your pimply grocers be paid no more than minimum wage. In Demoulas’ name, amen

What an honor it must be to work so close to a market basket… all praise Demoulas

Yeah, this one is pretty rough

Nothing will match the pain of the first March storm in 2018. I truly believed we’d flip to snow a la 1997, we got nothing. That expectation was particularly stupid on my part, not sure if any of you folks remember that storm

Part of me is happy that even with our advances in tech, nothing is guaranteed. Not sure we’d like perfect forecasts, it,d put us out of a fun hobby

This is the worst bust since March 22 2018, but maybe even that one was lower expectation

Do you know you can delete past images to free up upload space?

We can average the ICON and the CMC to get the prevailing model consensus.