ORH_wxman

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.

I think a lot of people have an unrealistic view of the past when it comes to winter wx. It certainly was colder, but it wasn't Quebec City either and the snow climatology was not 1925 BOS being equal to present day ORH or even present day BED....and a lot of the warming doesn't manifest in cyclogenesis anyway....rather in the milder patterns intruding into the region during more unfavorable hemispheric longwave setups and in radiational cooling spots during calm nights. CC really needs to be thought of in terms of probability on the tails which usually makes people's eyes glaze over, so I understand why its often dumbed down for the masses. But what it really means is that we've increased the chances of record warm events but this does not magically eliminate natural variability either. There's a reason we had our coldest month of all time in 2015 after over a century of CC....natural variation still is the dominant player on smaller timescales such as months and seasons. But when you get a canonical warm pattern, CC helps that become more likely to be record warmth versus 100 years ago.

Yeah maybe the Mar 13-14 storm last year is snowier into ORH city (huge gradient right there) in the days of yore....skeptical about it getting awesome much further east because of that nasty nipple low in CT driving those 925s inland, but maybe perhaps to 495ish could've seen 6-10" instead of mostly sloppy 3-6.

I will say CC was probably a statistically significant, but still relatively trivial factor in how last season played out. Unless (as I asked this question in the main forum) we believe that all of the sudden regional anomalies such as the Pacific warm blob (2013-2015) and -AO pattern from melting sea ice (2009-2013) are not going to be transitory this time around and New England is just semi-permanently being stuck as the warmest region in the CONUS relative to average for the foreseeable future.

Xmas 2021 was kind of cold too...lot of ice that morning after the little Xmas eve snow event. Maybe we can go 3 in a row that isn't a torch.

Perfect October weather. Gonna lose it though this weekend and that might be all she wrote. Longer range looks a lot colder.

'01-'02 and '11-'12 are terrible ENSO analogues. '01-'02 at least was coming off a 3-year La Nina like this year was, but it was a neutral ENSO year whereas we're gonna in a potent El Nino this winter. That doesn't mean the sensible wx can't be similar, but it would probably be for different reasons than those two winters.

Yeah and '77-'78 is a brutally cold analog that is unlikely to repeat on temps...though '14-'15 was basically the same DJFM temps as '77-'78...but that was also an extreme season. If we somehow return to a +PNA pattern that coincides with some arctic blocking, then we're gonna get cold for a time. We just haven't really seen that type of pattern in any type of sustained fashion since 2014-15 save maybe maybe Dec 2017/early Jan 2018 and Jan 2022....we had some shorter stints in Dec 2020 and 2nd half of Jan 2019 that helped cause the record breaking cold outbreak that month, but these have been the exception rather than the overwhelmingly -PNA rule with lower arctic blocking.

Yes, I find the evidence that MEI won't get close to super Nino status quite compelling. Still a small sample size, so I wouldn't rule it out entirely, but it does seem like it's going to be a moderate to maybe strong MEI at the peak rather than super. Weaker MEI could manifest in the pattern any number of ways....hopefully it's to our advantage. A somewhat stronger northern stream influence with still a decent STJ would probably be a best case scenario (ala a winter like '77-78)