ORH_wxman

Yeah what would have that map looked like if you started in 1985 instead of 2000?…it would be dark blue shades for “top 10% in snow cover increase”….no doubt that long term you’ll see snow cover days decrease with warming temps, but that 22 years doesn’t tell you much anything. You get a few snowy winters like the 2007-2011 period and it changes the math very quickly.

Got colder but not enough for most of us. But it helps them out up there.

Maybe we get screwed again, but it definitely won't be the same style as last year....such a different looking PAC.

It appears BOS stopped reporting snow depth after the 2003-2004 winter. So I have no idea what station they are using to determine anything past December 2003 for snow depth and white Xmas. We obviously know 2009 had snow there but in more marginal years, I'm not sure what they are using. I don't even think 2010 was that marginal either.

FWIW, the Hingham coop had a white christmas that year....still not sure what they are using to say BOS didn't have one because Logan airport didn't report snow depth in 2010.

Where are they getting the snow depth numbers from anyway? BOS stopped reporting snow depth well before 2010.

Just checked the NOHRSC maps and they seem to agree

I think 2010 was mostly Logan-specific. I was in Boston on Xmas eve and the common was covered with about 2-3" of snow and there was about 2" OTG the entire way back to ORH.

For ORH, general climo is the snowiest 1 month period is January 28th to February 28th. For CON, it looks like it's pretty similar, maybe January 30th to March 2nd.

I should be there pretty early around 430 im guessing. Won;t be able to stay too late though.

He's going pretty heavy on the snow for Jan/Feb....esp Feb which makes sense in an El Nino.

Tip is absolutely correct that if the posters who always post about warmth and no snow started their own thread, it would get almost no engagement. That’s how we know it’s trolling in here even if they claim otherwise. There’s a definite purpose to it to get responses from easily-baited snow lovers. Its a very easily tested theory…one of them should start a parallel thread for it. As for the LR, I don’t feel any differently than I did the last few days other than the longshot on 12/28 looks like an even longer shot today. But who knows, maybe it trends colder again tomorrow…either way, it doesn’t change the way it looks beyond that. Better pattern by month-end even if it’s not brutally cold. We probably get a bit more cold into our region in the first half of January as the ridge pops more poleward.

That’s actually pretty impressive verification from 300+ hours. Nailed the N PAC decently and the western ridge. Missed on the Atlantic side though.

Yeah but to be fair, when we were tracking it on the weeklies, it was mostly near or after Xmas…and it actually seems like that is going to verify now since we’re already seeing the seeds of the pattern creeping inside D10. There were a few brief times where it looked like we could get a big -NAO to offset some of the bad PAC but it was mostly transient…we did sneak in a semi-favorable look in the first week of December but wave-spacing hurt us in SNE and only the south shore of MA got that 1-3” event.

Yeah I think there’s a chance for that one but not a great one. But it’s been trending better the last couple of cycles so if that keeps up then maybe we have something to track for real by this weekend. Ensembles have been sharpening the ridge near Hudson Bay.

I wouldn't be all that critical of those who used that type of defensible reasoning....but most of the posts aren't of that substance. In fact, most of the posts don't have much substance at all other than it's not going to snow...sometimes with reference to "we heard this last December", as if that is really a logical scientific argument. QGomega (who can make a decent post when he wants to) did mention the MJO the other day claiming we would stall in phase 7, but that argument isn't really going to be all that viable now since we clearly didn't stall there and we're actually already exiting out of phase 7.

The sustained winds were more impressive than the gusts here.....we had some good gusts, but it was the constant 30-40mph sustained bursts that would last a long time.

I don't (and most mets wouldn't) consider this to be persistence forecasting....you're using meteorological variables (tropical convection in the Pacific or IO) to form the basis of a forecast. That's actual forecasting....persistence is when you ignore any other empirical evidence and only go based off of what has happened recently. We actually had a forecast competition in the meteorology department at Cornell (and many other met schools have them too) where you had to forecast the weather over the next 3 days. There was a few automated contestants....a couple of them were just MOS output and then there was one called "persistence"....I think it took the mean of the last few days to forecast the coming days. It consistently came in last place.

Yes. For some reason that broke a lot of people...acting like that never happened before. I could rattle off a bunch of great longwave looks that failed to produce.

Yes, but when it doesn't work, it's a spectacular failure which is why it's such a bad way to forecast. Persistence is typically going to involve periods of docile weather because stormy weather doesn't typically last weeks on end. So essentially, the strengths of persistence forecasting are doing very well when the weather is generally quiet....but it fails the most when the weather changes and becomes very unsettled, exactly the time when you want to have an accurate forecast out there. I don't think I ever met a skilled forecaster who said they incorporate a lot of persistence into their forecasts. It's one thing to sort of hedge toward climo in many instances due to familiarity with patterns and how they affect local sensible wx, but that is definitely not the same as a mindless drone "persistence" forecast. The irony in here over the persistence argument is that New England winters typically feature decent snow, so in this case, you can't even really claim persistence is hedging toward climo for the crowd in here that keeps saying it's not going to snow.

The old saying is persistence fails when the stakes are the highest. Besides, this current pattern doesn't look anything like last year so the only "persistence" is the sensible wx of little to no snow and AN temps. There's no reason to actually stick with persistence if evidence is starting to mount that it's coming to an end.

It was good to see the GEFS almost completely cave to the EPS the last couple runs in the 11-15 days. If you recall a couple days ago when the GEFS didn’t look awful but they weren’t nearly as good-looking as the EPS. Now they look like the EPS.

GEM is building in that high too for the 12/27 system....GEFS are starting to bite too, so we'll see if other guidance suites like the EPS try to come around on that potential threat.

I’m more impressed with BOS sustained winds at 43 knots than the 59 knot gust.

Because feels and vibes trump science. In all seriousness, the OP run sort of showed the same pattern…it’s just that you have to get rid of the cutter first in 12/27-28 on the OP run but it has a super amped meridional pattern over North America.