North and West

I’m going to be salty if I get slop or white rain again 

Maybe, winters tend to have a theme. Hopefully next year is our next 20/21.

You get too invested. You say this every Storm, the models change an flip flop so much. Can't get too invested until 72 hrs prior, sure you can track but no sense of living an dying with every model run

why don't we have a blocking high to the north-- wouldn't that be climo for early February?
I also saw that the AO is negative, doesn't that mean there's blocking present?

Quick question… why does everyone post model runs and then in the same turn talk about how awful said model is? If terrible, why share?


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I still believe the confluence will win out here. That and the baroclynicity will push it south a bit. Where the confluence war sets up sets the stage for a good hard thump. 

Penal Colony?

Every person on this community is a weenie including myself. lol  The workers of the NWS don't come into forums like this.  Bernie Rayno  probably one of the best experienced meteorologists i know.  Todays weather channel meteorologists are all kids.  Seems they almost just give atmospheric science degrees now like water.  They dummy down the physics and calculus.  Its sad everything now is ensembles and looking at models from run to run.   I look at 75% of todays news weather men or women and they have backgrounds as journalism, earth science, environmental science lol.  Those degrees don't go through the  tough math and physics calculus differential equations, multi variable calculus, thermodynamics etc.  probably why forecasts are horrible today.  Don't want to be negative.  I just like the real science behind the forecast.

Looks like 3-6" type event for Metro north of Rt.78 or so

He has an abrasive way of coming across but when this winter has he been wrong? If the confluence can’t press this south it will keep trending the wrong way. An energetic southern wave will pump the SE ridge and try to cut. The airmass out front is March-like. As usual there isn’t much/any help out west to force a better track. So we’re relying on confluence to pull a miracle. 

January 1961 was referenced last month. Even the Blizzard of 1978 (February) was referenced.

It will probably be rain up to I84 by 0z Saturday night 

Everyone afraid of snowman's weenies an Debbie downer talk. It still looks good. Curious to see eps if it moves south or what 

decided to place some more coherent thoughts here. this is effectively a system where the northern and southern streams are in conflict and either phase or remain separate. the northern stream (NS) can be seen over the Dakotas, and the southern stream (SS) can be seen over the Four Corners region

as we head through Sunday, it is a matter of how the two streams interact. there has been a consistent trend across guidance to push the NS ahead of the SS such that instead of phasing with the NS, it actually ends up compressing the flow, like so. the NS is strung out north of the Great Lakes, while the SS remains hung back over the Ozarks. this is a big departure from what we were seeing yesterday... GEFS trend loop attached, you can see the two streams drift apart

finally, once we're at the start of next week, the SS vort is effectively running into a wall of confluence rather than phasing with the NS. this promotes an intense precipitation field from a potent SLP. the ensemble members from the EPS and GEFS are routinely sub-990mb. again, this is a consistent trend to increase confluence and decrease phasing looking from 12z yesterday to now:

so, this leads to a SLP that's farther south rather the borderline inland runner that was showing up on earlier runs of the ECMWF and CMC. by the way, even the CMC has decidedly moved towards less stream interaction. confidence of 3" or more on the EPS has moved well south of where it was yesterday. this is a big move for the EPS, as it's generally pretty consistent, even at this range. the greatest snowfall remains to the north of I-78 and especially I-84:

let's look at the general 500mb pattern across North America to see if any of this is even viable. we can see ridging developing across the high latitudes, which is representative of the pattern change that is ongoing at this time. there is AK ridging, providing some colder air into the flow, and there is a lobe of the polar vortex that's providing some confluence just north of the Great Lakes. there is also ample low pressure over the North Atlantic, which promotes more confluence than not. the southern stream shortwave has a much harder time raising heights ahead of it with the flow downstream, so this kind of shortwave moving ENE rather than NE or NNE is indeed viable. again, notice the trend with less stream interaction and lower heights in SE Canada

are there any analogs that we can look at? there is only one that I'm really aware of, which is 2/23/87. this was also a pretty strong El Nino February, and I think the setup shares some features. both setups share the same kind of stream interaction that we're seeing... a potent SS vort and a northern stream vort that is generally out ahead of the system. there are a couple of differences, though. the first is that with this system, the northern stream did have a partial phase at the end, which is not what we're currently seeing (although possible!). second, there was a much more well established blocking pattern in place, as shown by the 500mb anomalies. there was much more confluence in the northern Atlantic, which is a more "classic" setup for a significant snowfall event. the 1987 event was a major snowfall event for the Mid-Atlantic, which is definitely unlikely here. however, take a bit of strength out of the eventual result (less phasing here) and shift things north (less confluence here), and the general axis and half of the total snowfall could be quite realistic


so, we will see where things go from here. the whole setup is definitely a bit of a needle threader, as the confluence is not locked in and is pretty much entirely dependent on the movements of the northern stream vort. therefore, there can be a renewed trend back north or even a move back to a phasing scenario. however, it seems like the trend is for more destructive interference from the NS rather than constructive, which is leading to increased confidence in a more southern solution. I would still pinpoint north of I-84 as the safest bet to see anything legit out of this, but anyone north of I-78 is in play. this is also more of a latitude than longitude based event, so being on the coast isn't that big of a deal, it would just hurt ratios. hopefully we have more clarity tomorrow afternoon (doubtful)

Wow, does it look like a 2010 repeat? El nino to la nina transitions are very hot!  The following winters are usually nice too
 

Funny how it used to always be the Kuchera maps that were the clown maps, and now it's the 10:1 ratio maps.

Mon-Tues is going to move north again

This is closer to reality

Def feel the spring sun!

Jfc 14 in a row

“Absent of some type of major volcanic eruption” 

God Forbid we see +5 or +8 in July

Don’t feel bad, they had close to 100 last winter 

Starting to get late early as Yogi Berra famously states....What a dumpster fire this winter has turned out to be.   Today felt frigid here with a low of 26 lol.   (finally got some radiational cooling under clear skies this weekend)

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