Sundog

The EURO, EURO AI and GGEM all have a big rain event from Thursday into Friday next week.

There were very few dud years up until about 1920. Only 6 years recorded under 20 inches of snow in 52 years worth of records, 1869-1920. Couple that with cooler temps and longer snow seasons and the wintertime feel would have been much more epic than today. And it's true that we didn't have wildly more snow, although those decades are closer to our highest overall average on record of 30-ish inches.

Milankovitch Cycles, small cyclical changes in precession, obliquity and eccentricity.

I understand the Little Ice Age quite fine. The northern hemisphere was affected more than the southern, so you can't just go by global averages. In addition to that, regionally the 1800s were quite cold in North America. And with a name like the Climate Changer you should know even a couple of C deviation is massive for a long term average, which was what was occuring during that time period. All I was saying is that since snow records begin in 1869 in New York, those first few decades were weening off the cooler overall regime.

I don't want to see anything above 20C until next April

27 winters of >40 inches between 1869 and 1997 9 winters of >40 inches between 1998 and 2024 So the ratio is definitely in our favor, when adjusted for number of years it was 3:1 when it should have been more like 5:1. For the dud years though the ratio is 1:1!!! That should have also been more like 5:1 since it's the same time periods. Basically both feast and famine has been more represented over the last 30 years, but ratio wise the famine has been severly more pronunced.

Two, 1972-1973 and 1988-1989.

The snow season was also longer, the first few decades of snow records from NYC show about half of Novembers having accumulating snowfall, some of them with major numbers. To be fair though we were on the tail end of ther Little Ice Age and so the background state was just overall naturally cooler even without global warming.

Fun/miserable fact: NYC had 6 <10 inch winters between 1869 and 1997. NYC had 6 <10 inch winters between 1998 and 2024.

Despite the very snowy period we also had a highly abnormal amount of under 10 inch winters embedded within the last 30 years as well. Those duds have been much more likely to occur since the Super El Nino compared to the 100+ years of snow records before. So while we averaged higher overall, the annual snowfall has been much more volatile in general, going from feast to famine.

I don't see that in the record

The stuff currently south of Long Island is better lined up for NYC if it can make it there.

NYC is currently shafted

The difference is the crysophere can still be in place in large swaths of Canada in April whereas it's nowhere to be found in mid September unless you're on the Arctic Ocean.

No chance. Though I would love nothing more to be true

Models are wishy washy with how much rain falls up here They mostly all bring the low up here to affect us, they just differ in how much rain actually falls once it's here.

The Euro AI has been the only model that was showing for many days that the rain would reach our coast. I don't know what the final outcome will be with this but all the models came around to it. Amazing job with the AI Euro sniffing this out days in advance of other models.

Clouds are one of the tricky variables that climate models haven't really nailed down yet. They can have cooling and warming effects.

Even if that's true (I have no idea) I think it's low clouds that do the best job at cooling the surface. So if we are losing low clouds that's bad if you want to keep the Earth's temp from rising further.

This is the wettest Euro run yet for the coastal low. This is 6z:

The potential is there for more intense systems. Theres a straightforward relationship between energy and intensity. That doesn't mean that intensity will be realized or there won't be other factors that hamper the realization of that intensity.

It's not out of the ordinary.

Excellent post Don. I've been saying for years that a model's usefulness goes far behind it's 500mb hemispheric score.

I read a study not too long ago that showed low clouds (I think it was low) were becoming less numerous because of warming. The warmer air/sea surface temps disrupt low cloud formation, leading to even more warming, leading to even more disruption, etc.

The oceans will continue to absorb C02, just because they got a little warmer doesn't mean they have reached the degassing point. They just won't absorb CO2 (or any gas) as well as they did when they were colder. That creates a positive feedback loop for global warming unfortunately. But they will continue to absorb gases, just not at the same rate.