ORH_wxman

I’ll admit my meteorological world view has been shattered when I learned geese feeding patterns were superior to model guidance. I promise to walk into 2023 a new man.

It’s the white (bald) faced hornet nest height. Not paper wasps. That’s why they pay us the big bucks.

After this December, I’m definitely adding geese feeding habits to my list of tools to use for forecasting.

“We should have used the geese to forecast”

Ukie looked intriguing for next week too. It’s good to see a bit more non-GFS guidance trying to get something going. You’d still want to see the trailing shortwave trend more amped in future cycles to be more than a nuisance/advisory type event though.

Euro actually had a bit of snow on the 00z run for eastern MA.

And we live in the part of the US that probably has one of the longest lags. So many other spots have their peak climo closer to the solstice than we do. Most of them have lags too but far less than ours.

You need to be in CAD land to have a realistic shot at a “wire to wire” winter for snow pack (I’ll define wire to wire as continuous pack or at least nearly continuous.) Only a small part of SNE really gets into that zone…I’d call it N ORH county mainly near and N of rt 2. My old stomping grounds on winter hill was on the edge of that zone but definitely not quite as good. The other area that is in that zone is the east slope of Berkshires and maybe including down into Hippy’s area. East slope above like 1600 feet is prob in a separate category themselves. The rest of interior SNE can sort of fake it for 3-4 week stretches outside of those truly special winters. Places like BOS maybe get something semi-close to wire to wire once per 15 years or something.

How many winters are great all 4 months from Dec-Mar…I have them all memorized like a weirdo, but I bet you would have a hard time naming even 3.

Probably any solid warning event would. But not counting on anything for that threat. It would be a bonus if we got something though. If it’s gonna happen though we prob want to see some improvements on the 00z or 12z guidance here soon. 12z tomorrow puts us inside of 6 days and the key pieces will already be inside of 5 days.

Yeah climo at 850 starts going toward like -6 to -8 in this area so moderately AN temps in that layer aren’t a death knell for snow. Euro guidance is also warmer than the others. If we can go split flow, then you end up with something more like +2 departures at 850 with a favorable storm track and that is doable.

Ok yeah I agree the double digit positive departures aren’t going to sustain. They usually don’t. It looks like a lot of those airmasses where the high is 37-43 but cold enough for snow when a storm system approaches. We kind of had a pattern with temps like that in Jan 2021 but we whiffed on most of the storm threats. However, that pattern was mostly a stale NAO block while this one does have western ridging which is more conductive to storm threats.

While noreaster27 always predicts warmth regardless of the pattern shown, I don’t totally disagree this time. It doesn’t look cold. Just colder than the blowtorch we get in the next week but prob still above normal. But it’s a better looking pattern to try and get winter storms in here since we get more western ridging and there’s a lot of split flow showing up. We may get a little more actual cold after the 2nd week of Jan but that is a lot more speculative. A lot of guidance keeps retrograding the Canada ridge which then re-establishes a cross-polar look and more cold. But that would likely happen around or after 1/15ish.

I’d love to see some of the upper air maps from the 1870s/1880s…historically I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a volatile 10-15 year period. You had some epic cold in the early 1870s and some epic warmth in late 1870s (I think 1877-78 is still the warmest winter in record for a large swath of upper plains to western Midwest…it’s like 5F warmer than 2nd place I think at MSP, lol)….then you oscillated between some epic warmth and cold in the 1880s…and we have March 1888 to top it off.

Check against 1/6/07 too. I think that day cracked 70F across a lot of eastern MA. Or check New Years Day 1876….mud up to thy knickers as sleighing was not favorable that day.

Crushed the daily record by 6F so far. I’m still always amazed at the 70F on 12/29/84 when I look at record highs around this time. Then I see an 8/-3 day on the same date in 2017. Late Dec seems to have the highest variance of temps than any other time of year…anecdotally anyway. I’d have to run the numbers.

Going on a hike this afternoon once the youngest wakes up from nap. Gotta take advantage of these days. Beats the useless cold we just had with bare cracked ground.

Still a lot of uncertainty beyond 1/5. GFS suite has been more aggressive on the cold…esp post 1/10. Euro suite not as much…it’s been more of a stale polar airmass look which is kind of what we had for a while in Jan 2021 before the pattern flipped to colder/snowier in the Jan 25-Feb 15 timeframe.

Forecasting a pattern and forecasting specific storms threats, etc are definitely two different things. The Dec 9-25 period is a good illustration. The general pattern was forecasted quite well. I’ve posted the composite. The individual storm threats were a total nightmare to forecast during that period.

Dissenting points of view are definitely welcome. But they will be mocked mercilessly if they don’t have much substance or science to it.

It can be. No guarantees though. It’s a good way to “reshuffle” the hemispheric pattern though. It will help make coastals a little more favorable than a classic base state La Niña pattern.

Yep if you wanted a break from La Niña, the upcoming pattern has granted that wish. Both N PAC and the North America pattern look like El Niño boilerplate.

It’s basically split flow with above normal heights over most of Canada but BN over the south in the LR. Very El Niño-ish. It can work as long as you keep the flow split…Jan ‘83 was like that and so was Jan 2016….but I like how in this case, the STJ wouldn’t be as raging.

Retro that mean ridge a bit back toward Rockies like weeklies and GEFS have and it would prob start getting a lot colder. Not Jan 2003 cold…that is one of the colder Januarys in the pst few decades…but still colder than we’ve been. Kind of weird seeing very low gradient in the height field in a Niña though. Might give us some chances in a meh pattern coming up here in the next 7-10 days.