ORH_wxman

It's kind of a '57-'58-esque temp pattern...and that was a big interior winter. Coast did ok too, but the real goods were interior.

Yeah over the interior of SNE, '95-96 is still #1. In fact, in ORH, '14-'15 isn't even #2, it narrowly loses to '92-'93. Regardless, if we can get some good periods of +PNA mixed with a favorable polar domain, then we should have plenty of chances this winter. Hell, even a -PNA/-AO would be ok provided we're not first digging the PNA trough into S CA and Baja first before it swings eastward like December last year.

Yeah I loved the old hour/storm total/snow depth obs at the end of the METARs

Yeah the coast got decent snow on the front end of that post-Xmas storm....it just got matted down with a lot of rain when it flipped while it stayed snow around 128 and west. But that's still a good December on the coast.

Doesn't look quite as bad as some other recycled garbage patterns because you have a pretty strong ridge poking up to the GOA....so even though the EPO isn't strongly negative, you have cross polar flow at least coming from Bering/AK region rather than the source region being the Pacific. The pattern actually looks really similar to Dec 1967...that month was near normal temps, maybe slightly above (in the 1967 context with '51-'80 normals)....but it had some decent snow chances, although you'd probably take a toaster bath in the 12/28/67 storm which was a classic Rt 128 storm where BOS and the south shore struggled while metrowest cleaned up.

El Nino (particularly strong El Ninos) produces a spike in global mean sfc temps because more of the OHC is pushed to the sfc in El Nino.

Yeah I commented that it looked like there was decent cold getting into the CONUS for Dec even if it was mostly west of us....but we know that can bleed over the top at times and setup a gradient storm or two. The ideal scenario is for December to act more Nina-ish and then we flip to classic Jan/Feb El Nino.

Thanks....yeah if we got that type of -EPO in Dec, then we're prob off to the races. That's a Dec '09 look...... though with a west-based -NAO that is more tame than the 2009 steroids version. But that would still be an excellent winter pattern.

What's the track record on that 2 months out? I can't imagine it's great.

That's a great look for Jan/Feb but somewhat ugly for Dec....though at least in Dec you still have decent cold flowing down into the CONUS and not a GOA monster low torching everything, so you'd hope you could sneak in some chances.

I don't doubt that is true. There were also studies showing we were getting more frequent winter -AO "warm arctic/cold continent" patterns in the 2000s/early 2010s compared to the previous 2-3 decades, but that trend obviously did not sustain. Maybe the MJO trend will...my default is to be skeptical of regional trends sustaining which is where the literature struggles the most.

Def trended warmer for the east and gulf coast, but probably colder for the rest of the majority of the country west of the Apps. The pattern actually looks like a colder version of the 2012-13 where that H5 minimum anomaly is out in the rockies....better AK ridging than '12-'13.

The last 10-15 years got my head spinning on a lot of the attribution studies....they often feel like "flavor of the month"....trying to explain a multi-year pattern as something more permanent like those other examples I gave above. They haven't managed to stand the test of time so far. I'm not going to claim that the northeast cannot warm a lot faster than everywhere else for a long period of time, but it certainly would be pretty unusual for that to happen at our middling latitude. That type of consistent (say, multiple decades) higher end warming trend has been almost exclusively relegated to the high latitudes and lower latitude trends have typically fluctuated a lot more.

Maybe? Are we sure that's the primary culprit? And if it is, is it going to continue? Do we need to update CC models to show that the plains and west are going to be colder than originally expected moving forward while the east is going to be warmer? Are we sure another Pacific blob isn't going to show up like 2013-2015 or more sea ice-induced monster -AO patterns? I dunno....they are plausible, but color me skeptical on regional enhancements being more than transitory outside of more robust empirical evidence (I'd put arctic amplification in that category...far more robust evidence supporting it).

Don't think I've used the AC since that heat wave in early Sept.....it was pretty warm yesterday, but I think the house just doesn't warm up as quick with the weaker sun. We have a lot of trees around too, so the lower sun angle makes it shadier in the shoulder seasons.

Considerably weaker arctic blocking on the new run and much weaker Aleutian low.

Yeah I ran the numbers a few years ago and the mean winter for ORH with measurable snow in October was basically the same as the regular mean. I think since I did those numbers, we had the October 2020 snow event, but that winter dumped like 77” of snow at ORH so it certainly didn’t bring it down…if anything, it prob pushed the number a small tick higher.

Yes, it would make them more common. That's going to be true by definition in a warmer world....in a previous torch where it didn't quite all melt out to Canada, now it might. But I think people should be aware of the statistics and probability to competently discuss it. I often come across even supposedly vetted news articles that claim certain weather events are "unprecedented" only to find something extremely similar in the past....or worse, something that even eclipsed their example. CC makes anything warmer more likely....the "loaded dice" description is pretty accurate IMHO....but the question is by how much and when we are discussing non-temperature weather events such as large storms, nor'easters, droughts, etc, how much weight is CC on the attribution list? Sometimes the answer is zero or at least statistically insignificant. That's where some of our previous discussions went when talking about the anomalous warm winters we've seen since 2017-18...a lot of people knee-jerkingly blamed CC as the primary culprit, but it's extremely unlikely that it was. It's part of the reason, but a few seasons of mostly warm winters is more likely caused by natural variability with CC acting as a tail wind. The evidence for this is that other regions of the country and continent have become significantly colder in those same seasons....here are the winters since '17-18 versus the previous 5. We can repeat this exercise too for previous periods like when the northern plains down to the SE US were warming way more rapidly in the late 1980s/1990s and then they became colder in the 2000s/early 2010s. The longterm average increases but it's not a smooth ride.

Was that the March storm this year?

This one was the cause of an epic Kevin meltdown....MLK weekend massacre 2010

I reall wish that site went back to March 2001....that gradient would have been even more ridiculous....you had 40+ in ORH county and almost nothing in SE MA.

How many events recently have we had like 0C 925mb temps at the onset? Having a semi-real airmass over Quebec into NE would help....which has been like pulling teeth the last few seasons...and it was especially comical last season when getting a Scooter high was like trying to get NBC to stop showing Taylor Swift in the luxury suite. Goes back to some of the regional analysis I was doing with the temp anomalies when we break down the last few decades into subsets.

Congrats ACK/MVY this year based on SSTAs?

Easy to torch on NE winds when the nearest high pressure is over the Flemish cap. Get us some highs north of CAR that feed down some legit dewpoints and lets try it again.