ORH_wxman

Really close there on the Euro....sharpen that s/w up just a smidge and you have a real event. We'll see what he ensembles look like in a few.

Monday night really…some models have it going well into Tuesday…I don’t think that one is all that interesting from a snow standpoint. Maybe a few sloppy inches for the hills but prob white rain or plain rain for many unless we see the intensity ramp up a bit more. The one behind it seems to have a little better look from a ageo flow standpoint if we can bring it back.

I'm surprised the mean that is robust....OP was pretty much nothing (had the front runner wave, but didn't amplify the one behind it)

Ukie isn't as interested in making the second shortwave the main player...tries to do the front runner wave.

Model skill does start to decrease as the PJ weakens and lifts north. March is a little early for that though....maybe late March there's a slight degradation, but I wouldn't expect model guidance to be noticeably worse than a month ago.

Yeah, pointing out inconsistencies in attribution studies is being a denier. So which one is it....CC causing -NAO or +NAO....you got the answer, right?

Theyve been the same since I first found them in the late 1990s too. I'm amazed they still even exist in that hideous capacity.

Funny, I saw the 84h RGEM and was thinking "GGEM is prob gonna be interesting"....and sure enough.

Yeah if we're talking butterfly effects....then you can attribute CC to everything, since we're in a world with that influence. There no world without at the moment. But the true value of attribution studies is the "net effect". One reason I like to stick to the truly empirical studies is you can actually measure some of this stuff more confidently rather than trying to fix too much of it into a model which will always have some levels of assumptions. You still need models even on empirical attribution studies, but you try and use as much real data as possible. Temperature is probably the bets example....we have a TON of temperature data so we're pretty confident on a lot of the temperature changes. But other things with lower sample sizes shorter periods of record can get really dicey very quick. There's a model for everything....in the 1997-2002 period, we saw a lot of studies that said CC was helping make the NAO more positive having come off a recent 2 decade binge of positive NAO winters. Of course, fast forward 10-15 years to the early/mid 2010s after that binge of excessive -NAO/AO winters between 2009-2013 and so many of the NAO/CC studies started claiming the opposite....that reduced sea ice and arctic amplification was actually causing the NAO/AO to become more negative. We don't hear about those studies much anymore after the binge of +NAO winters again post-2013 (and prior to this season). We saw similar papers come out that you mentioned about the "pacific warm blob" causing the big +PNA ridges out west in the 2013-2015 years.....now in the past few seasons we can't stop talking about troughs slamming into Cabo San Lucas. I'm sure CC is involved in all of these things, but the net effect isn't confident so when I read claims like "CC making negative NAO winters more/less likely", I tend to mostly roll my eyes since so many of those things are based on shorter samples and lots of models with assumptions in there. Sometimes, the headlines don't really match the paper either...you'll read that headline and then the paper has this really weak correlation where they state a lot of uncertainty and I'm thinking "how did that headline get written based on that paper?".

I remember way before the insane CC debates trying to attribute 7 year trends to it, we used to discuss back in college how inflated the 1951-1980 or 1961-1990 snowfall normals were compared to 1971-2000 (after those came out while in the middle of college)....and whether 1971-2000 was a sign of decreasing snow or just a really shitty period because it had the brutal 1980s but didn't have a prolific decade in it anymore like the 1960s. It turned out that it just happened to be a shitty period in the 30 year record....as we quickly returned to larger snowfall winters. No guarantee that always happens, but it was am interesting conversation at the time which parallels some of the discourse on here.

We will agree to disagree. I think you are conflating absolute model performance with relative model performance. Euro used to be way better than the others. But the others have closed the gap some so it doesn’t seem as trustworthy. I can provide you plenty of examples in the last 10 years where the euro had some hiccups…January 2015 blizzard for starters. Or January 2016 blizzard too. It was really late on Feb 5, 2016 as well. Its loss of prolific dominance is really the only striking feature I can identify in the euro now compared to 8-10 years ago. I don’t see it as being an actually worse model than back then.

I’m almost positive this is wrong. Models have gotten so much better than where we were 15 years ago. We remember the euro’s coups well because there were many, but it had plenty of times where it waffled a bit. I think it had the 12/19/08 storm as a Detroit cutter 5 days out until it quickly turned it into a snowy SWFE. I also recall it having some pretty huge solutions for interior SNE in December 2012 pre-Xmas about 4 days out that failed pretty horribly. We of course remember the Feb 2013 coup. The GFS imho is vastly improved so the relative difference between them has shrunk even though the euro has gotten better too. We were just so used to ignoring all the other models during large threats back then. Now we have to actually look at other guidance and consider it.

I'd really put the line more closer to day 5 when it really became more lethal against its competition....that's when the old Euro sniffed out some of the past big dogs like Jan 2011 and Feb 2013 or even Jan 2018. These 150-174 hour storms are going to be all over the place...and it's on all guidance too just not the Euro....GFS went from basically nothing to a deep layer easterly crush job yesterday at 12z to a mid-atlantic special in 3 consecutive runs....and now back to nothing again. Canadian had nothing mostly, and then all of the sudden today it decided it wanted to play. Some of the storms in recent years have been tracked from D7-8 which probably clouds our judgement on model skill. Dec 17, 2020 we tracked from like D9, lol...and I think a couple others we tracked from a long ways out....I know Feb 1-2, 2021 was at least 8 days and so was last January 29th.

Yeah I know it's not utterly dominant anymore, but this really isn't a good example....since day 6-7 is fringe clown range. Nobody should expect model guidance to be consistent at this range. It honestly wouldn't be that surprising if it came back either.

It was a day 6-7 threat....

If you want to see how my comparison looks at H5, it's pretty much what you'd expect....all that -PNA troughing trend combined with a mostly more positive NAO (even with this winter included in the composite) compared to 2000-2015

Yeah I was gonna respond, but glad I saw you responded first....I'd agree we've been kind of "due" for one of those prolonged colder stretches (even within the realm background warming)....but the snow hasn't been absent at all from SE MA on the whole over the last 8 seasons. But we gotta flush the general trend of of all the cold dumping into the plains and rockies before we return to more prolonged colder stretches in winter. Hopefully next year does that in an El Nino. You can see how the previous winters of the 21st century differed from the most recent 8 winters.....look where the max warming is (in the east) with little change or even cooling in the N plains to N Rockies and Northwest...with a lot of cooling in the NAO region.

There's like 3 vortmaxes in the flow....so guidance will prob need a little more time to figure them out. Ukie was pretty much nothing. Icon almost pulled a Canadian but not quite.

Yeah there's this pocket of lower gas prices I frequently see on the upper south shore there that sometimes extends inland a little SW toward Taunton.

Yeah Ray had a 30 burger in the Mar 2018 storm.

06z EPS looks pretty decent. Guess we'll see what 12z brings. Still not all that compelling yet until we get another 24-36 hours closer.

Yeah I was out on winter hill a couple days ago and there was still full coverage there but literally a mile away to the southeast had almost nothing except piles. There’s prob still full coverage just a few miles further into Holden today.

Yes, there were quite a few EPS members that were pretty big snows well south into SNE and a few even into the Mid-atlantic. Definitely worth keeping an eye on given the cross-model support and ensemble support....but I'll probably wait until Friday if it's still there before taking it seriously.

GFS type solution would not be....elevaiton still would play a big role, but it wouldn't be quite like last week's storm because it doesn't have that primary low appendage sticking in CT...so you'd see more widespread snowfall on that type of look. Elevations would still do better since the ratios would be better for them. But this is all theoretical since the storm is 6-7 days out.

A GFS-esque solution was much more threatening for SNE....had deep layer easterly flow and it was plenty cold enough just off the coast. Euro solution is close, but I'd perfer the ULL to track a bit further south....a BUF-MSV-BID H5 ULL track isn't exactly ideal for SNE unless the antecedent airmass is really strong, which is rare in a late season event like this.