Henry's Weather

Long post: It does seem like this blocking pattern isn't perpetually 10 days away on the ensembles, as both the EPS and the GEFS bring out the purple coloring at hr 96. Of course, it isn't immediately in an ideal location. I wonder if there's much precedent for blocks moving north instead of retrograding west as I've often heard about. Looking at both the american and the european suites, it does seem like maybe the path is NW, so some sort of a compromise. To my eye, it looks like this miller B Jan 4th storm bombs out near Newfoundland and sort of runs into those higher heights like a battering ram and pushes it NW? I'm not a scientist, so I don't know much of the physical processes involved. Wisdom says that our best chances occur at the formation and dissolution of these blocks, with the best chance at the dissolution, as some modified cP air has usually been dislodged south at that point, which is what I believe happened with our 12/16-17 storm? So, this wisdom leads me to assign Jan 8-9 and some time mid-late January (maybe the 18th-20th) as the most legitimate threats. I'd be interested to see if this verifies. We also seem to be southern stream dominated at first, with northern stream chances improving if we somehow get some PAC ridging going on mid-month. I think most in NE would agree, with the exception of some far SW Connecticut people, that Manitoba Maulers forced under a block is a much preferable synopsis to a southern stream event. Anyways, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but we haven't had actual sustained -NAO conditions in January for quite some time. According to this table I snipped off of CPC's site, we haven't averaged a neg NAO in Jan since 2010 and 2011, and obviously, we know the history of those winters. Many of us prefer one of those to the other, but the point remains that we haven't seen this kind of stuff in a while. I wonder if we can actually pull it off. edit: I can recall 2016, before the blizzard, having something like -4 SDs AO conditions, so I'd assume there was some extended period of -NAO there as well

Typical caveats apply, but that is a monstrosity of a ridge out in the plains for Jan 8th threat. Shame there seems to be a s/w diving in from Canada that stops a mature evolution from happening on this particular run.

we do indeed

I was poking fun at Ray's definition of major, but what you said makes sense.

eh, is it truly major though?

To get more mesoscale, I just think models struggle to handle period transitions, and since the strong block has been consistent, I'm relatively confident everything else will fall in place with time.

I feel like confidence is reasonably high because we have already had an extended period of blocking this winter

what a massive signal

Holy shit, Kocin? That's pretty awesome.

solid rates, solid rates

hoping we can get some of that rotting deformation band in a couple hours.

Although it does appear that @ORH_wxman did pretty well

For once, I'm glad to not be in ORH

Absolutely caked

Lucky I got the insurance of a coastal front. We're usually guaranteed to not suck subsidence here. About a foot on the ground and the snow is super heavy.

is that additional?

i don't think I've ever seen heavier rates. So glad I woke up. Several inches in Somerville.

Off to bed, 5 AM wakeup. Hopefully I don't miss the heaviest rates but I also need sleep

All solutions are basically the same at this point, no? CAMs doing the NW push thing and bumping totals while globals track this closed H5 low from NYC metro east. Pretty much locked in it seems

Expecting a nice event, waking up on Thursday morning at dawn to several inches of fluffy snow with more throughout the day. More model watching just feeds my neuroticism at this point

ideally i turn radar off too, but that might be tough

Time to turn models off and just enjoy the build up

wait, isn't that like no lift south of NH?

Precip field appears more uniform for this run

bullish but probably makes some sense. There’s probably gonna be a 16-20" zone where WAA snows meet deformation banding.