ORH_wxman

I'm not sure if missing out on a moderate event in late March is a defining feature of a rat season.

Both times it happened to me here was in early May. They just mangled them and bent the metal posts they were on as if they were a paper clip. The power it must have taken was impressive.

Still gotta watch late next week/next weekend....guidance all over the place on that car crash in the north atlantic giving us a 50/50 low and a big trough ejecting from the central CONUS. Could get interesting....it could easily fail too, but worth keeping an eye on for now.

Mish Michaels went to my alma mater for meteorology. Maybe 11-12 years before me. I met her at in 2002 at the storms conference. Very kind woman. She was always doing outreach programs around Boston helping kids get into science and weather. Tragic loss.

AWT

Decades in forecasting...an analog is just something comparable to another thing. You can use any variable you want for an analog. The analogs were more primitive the further back you go. Some mets would just look at fall temps and precip and compare those to past years. In the late 1980s/1990s, ENSO probably became the major factor in analogs. It became the primary factor once certain distinct patterns were showing up on ENSO that often repeated themselves. (such as cooler wx in the southeast US and warmer in the upper plains during El Ninos) Now we have better observations of solar, QBO, snow cover, etc. New England itself is tougher IMHO because we have a low correlation with ENSO and many other variables compared to places like the southeast or northern plains or Pacific northwest. That's why I have never really attempted seasonal forecasting for winter in New England....but I applaud those who try. Someone will eventually find a better way to forecast here in advance.

You can actually do a pretty decent seasonal forecast without looking at a single model....most will look at ENSO conditions along with solar, QBO, etc. Those are real-time obs so they don't require models. But you cannot do a skilled seasonal forecast without looking at past seasons (i.e. analogs). We have to look at them to know how variables like ENSO affect the pattern.

There's no such thing as seasonal forecasting without looking at past seasons....unless you are just going to rip and read a CFS or ECMWF seasonal forecast.

The cold was only decent for a 2-3 week period in January....otherwise mostly dogshit. I had a lot of "pack days" but so many of them were 2-3" glacier pack days that are not great. I had like 1 snow event all winter that fell on top of a pack that was more than 3 inches. This winter was a solid D+/C- here....maybe it can salvage a C/C+ if we get one more decent event.

Yeah most of my DPW clients would wait until around 4/15 or so unless there was an obvious threat approaching. Though they'd start telling their contractors a little earlier than that sometimes assuming they could probably get away with their domestic supply if an April event happened.

Most snow events in April and May won't require DPW road crews to do much....at least outside the higher elevations. Late March is a bit more likely to need man power on the roads.

His clients are most likely concerned with snow when they mean "winter". Though it might depend on who they are....most of my clients back when i worked in the field were DOT/DPW clients so they cared about snow...less about temps unless it was in context with the storm so they could know how much brine or salt they needed.

Yeah that was a sweet couple of storms. I rode that snowpack into the first couple days of April iirc. prob my best March since 2001. Though 2013 was close.

The 2017 storm was one of the better front enders I’ve been in. We had about 14-15” and most of it fell in about 5-6 hours. Very good rates. We never actually changed over to sleet even though I thought we would. Just got mid-level dryslotted and went to cruddy flakes and snow grains. It was a very meaty snow though. Prob 10 to 1 ratios at most. The snow pack easily stuck around until the very end of the month.

Yeah the Euro schooled the GFS last storm in the medium range. We’ll see if it’s got it’s mojo back or if it’s still in a dogfight for supremacy.

One final hurrah in the final week of March? Heres 5 day EPS mean H5 and then 850 anomaly below…you can see cold source temporarily gets re-established for a winter threat potential…and yea, clown range ensemble caveats still apply

Ha, I prob went down those same trails a few days later. It was definitely an incredible ski weekend....some of the best conditions I've skied in when you combine the snow and temps. It was like mid to upper 20s and chalky snow on the groomers despite late March and the woods were just buried. Hopefully similar dumpage this year.

Yeah and I had zilch on the ground down here...one of the more impressive gradients I've seen. They just got crushed over and over again that month while we got shafted here despite it being a very cold pattern. But the March snow up there is great....best skiing month hands down in NNE IMHO.

Reminds me of the 10 day period in 2014 where they got like 3 feet between 3/13 and 3/23....I think you were at Sunday River for the 2nd of those 3 events....like a 12-16" paste bomb on 3/19-20/14. I arrived the next day and then we got a 3-4" clipper on 3/22.

What a weenie run for that area....they get pretty good snows on the clipper too. That plus the weekend deal puts them at like 2 feet of snow over the next 7 days, lol.....would be good for the ski areas though....SR and sugarloaf look to get smoked too.

Maybe....but that wouldn't explain the obscenely low numbers in the Allagash of Maine.

I'm starting to think it's just a 2021-2022 snowfall anomaly map using elevation contours attempting to represent the anomaly...it would explain why SE MA and coastal Maine are "higher" than areas to the northwest.....although I don't think they quite achieved what they intended anyway. Places like S VT are solidly below normal for snowfall but still show up high on the map. It's just a terrible and confusing map that doesn't give us much useful information.

I'm not sold on Thursday....could be 'rhea out of the east.

It also has my current location down to NW RI higher than the spine of ORH county. Lol Not correct.

Some good radar shots from that storm too