ORH_wxman

No, midweek system is like 1/3. We’re talking end of week.

That man high has been showing up a bit more on various runs. Even some of the EPS members had it. It’s watchable at least. Better than nothing to track. Also, getting an event on 1/5 would be a bit of a bonus when we were mostly writing off until at least 1/8-1/9

Low confidence forecasts. I mentioned this yesterday but the long range guidance is not confident on the look past the first week of Jan. This isn’t high confidence like we saw with the monster December NAO block and -EPO block. Ensembles were very confident with not a ton of spread.

Actually impressive how close the match is on the pattern over much of North America…except we got the PV trapped under the Baffin block in Dec ‘55 which actually just gave us suppression depression and frigid temps.

Meteorological winter is just a designated date on the calendar. It doesn’t mean anything in terms of sensible wx. Early March is a lot more wintry than early December. If you asked me what our coldest/snowiest 3 month period is from a climo standpoint, I’d prob say something like 12/10-3/10…maybe even 12/15-3/15.

I love when people at 1200 feet in ORH county try and credibly claim winter is over on Feb 28.

Yeah it’s possible there’s a connection. Those were both brutal stretches here too. That ‘32-44 stretch was nearly as bad as the ‘79-‘92 stretch here.

There were some good mid-Atlantic winters that decade. Esp southern and coastal mid-Atlantic. Like jersey shore area down to Delmarva. But they were brutal up here. There were basically 3 solid winters that decade but no true blockbuster winters. ‘86-87 was close I guess. And there were some awful rats. Just god-awful snow totals in spots multiple years.

We’re just worried about him. Sometimes we have to whip him back into winter mode, even if it means dragging him there while kicking and screaming.

Dude, you need to log off for like a solid week and then check back in. You’re going to drive yourself crazy searching for a winter wx event 10+ days out.

Yeah and I don’t think the pattern looks that great by 1/10 anyway on the EPS. But we’re getting close to peak climo for cold so simply moving away from an AK pig would give us some chances. GEFS looks a bit better. There will likely be changes too on the ensembles given the spread we see right now. The mean is not a high-confidence mean like we saw in the NAO block some weeks back. Ensembles were very confident in that -EPO/-NAO pattern. They are not confident at all in the 11-15 day right now.

Right but that just reinforces my main point…we’re essentially looking at d10-15 snowfall. Nothing before that. Any “calls” about snowfall beyond D10 should be very low confidence. It’s different than when you’re going into a favorable pattern like around d5 where you’d prob get a slew of ensemble members showing something favorable prior to d10.

In practice, any snowfall on there south of about the VT/Canada border is prob beyond D9…so in that sense, it’s mostly long range snowfall.

The amount of spread on these makes it somewhat useless to try and prognosticate on snowfall.

EPS looked pretty bad in the D10-13 range. It got better at the very end. But there’s a ton of spread on the EPS (and the GEFS too) so it’s hard to take the LR too seriously at the moment. The tropical forcing seems to generally get more favorable as we go into January so hopefully that produces better outcomes.

Euro and EPS took a step toward GFS for 1/5-6. That one might be watchable. Esp for NNE but perhaps further south.

I don’t think I’d call it “patently false”. We had a vortex over the Davis Strait and Baffin regions. Maybe for the Feb 2nd event there was some ridging poking up toward Greeland that helped redevelop that SWFE into a coastal The crazy success of that 3 week period was due to a nearly “standing wave” ideal PNA ridge out west…and the one time it broke down a bit in the Feb 7-11 window, we had well-timed Scooter streak to keep us north of the boundary and we got a 3 day overrunning event that dumped 2 feet in BOS

He just makes shit up. Don’t treat his posts as anything other than unserious clutter.

Dec 2017/early Jan 2018 was mostly PAC-driven too.

Same general mechanism that produces the snow/ice on the GFS for 1/6. GEM actually presses the TPV lobe a little too much.

You must have been under a rock in 2013-2014 and 2014-2015.

Really the earliest chance for anything would prob be around 1/6-1/7…so we snooze for now. There’s so much spread on the state of the PAC, I’m not going to get too invested in trying to analyze the guidance. There’s still a generally improving look in the tropics so I’m cautiously optimistic the deeper we get into January but there’s far from any guarantees.

‘12-13 too for coastal areas (interior had some good events prior) But those years weren’t Ninas. Gotta hope for a year like ‘55-56 or ‘00-01 in the second half if we’re gonna do it in a Niña. The one positive we have going is the huge blocking that already showed up. Those types of blocking episodes tend to be a harbinger of future blocking later that same winter. Not always but more often than not. I’m not seeing much blocking though returning yet on guidance. Mostly just the PNA turning positive.

Those h5 maps above are a great illustration of how the ensembles actually did predict the mean pattern fairly well, but the smaller scale features within the mean pattern mostly broke against us and those smaller scale nuances are not easily predictable at 1-2 weeks notice.