ORH_wxman

Shortwave behind that tracks into Quebec....need it further south for a good SWFE.

To further my point above....this is pretty amazing....look at the difference in winter temps between 2008-2022 and 1991-2007.....where is the warmest region in the US? New England. Coldest? Upper plains. A winter like '02-'03 would def work to reverse that trend. That winter was actually pretty mild in the northern plains but it was frigid over NE.

You could maybe throw in December 2017 into early January 2018 for another semi-sustained period where the cold was centered over us. But yeah, it's been pretty tough on a longer timeline since those early 2000s winters.....most of the cold has been centered over the plain states and into upper Rockies.....theyve had colder winters in the past 10-15 years there than they did in the 1990-2005 period.

Yeah those colder early 2000s winters (sans '01-'02) had the cold centered right over NY/New England. We haven't really seen that since on any sustained basis except maybe for that 8-10 week period in 2015.

Not sure there is anything more insecure than going on a weather forum and chastising people and then bragging about your wealth.....you hate to see it.

I would argue we weren't the center of the cold either in the 2007-2015 period.....we did have the record-breaking cold in Feb 2015, but the cold anomalies were largely centered to our west otherwise

Prior to 2015 maybe that was the case, but not since then....the eastern US has been a torch....only the far southeast US has been warmer than our region.

The northeast has actually been one of the warmest regions relative to average in the entire country since the 2015 snow/cold blitz. So a little regression on that front wouldn’t be surprising.

Maybe we can have a repeat of 9/30/92....only 60 runs to go

We're definitely overdue for a big -NAO December....haven't had one since the back to back jobs in 2009 and 2010.

We didn’t have a very poleward Aleutian ridge either last December. We still could’ve done well with a slightly less ridiculous PNA trough out west, but a much better EPO region would’ve made things a lot easier. You push the meat grinder region further southeast in that scenario….and we end up a lot colder with a little more space to maintain shortwaves.

JMA wants to slam the big -NAO in December....we've seen this from a few seasonals. I'm skeptical of seasonal models but if there's a theme that starts emerging, I want to see if it actually verifies.

I'm not sure it affects us that drastically once winter comes around. The entire arctic ocean save for maybe near the Bering Strait is long frozen by that point.....but fast refreeze could lead to colder airmasses earlier in fall. There's some research that all the latent heat release from fast refreeze could affect the height pattern up there in different ways, but it's still pretty marginal attribution at the moment.

Here's one list....but it only goes through 2013. Looks like there's plenty of events that happened in a westerly QBO phase. Easterly is favored for sure, but it's like a 60/40 split. This list was only "major" events which actually reverse the wind field. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/List-of-the-Major-SSW-Events-Recorded-Between-1958-and-2013-Peak-lunar-tidal-Peak-ZMZW_tbl1_324608809

Yeah although there was a pretty good one in late Feb 1995 and early March 1991. But the really high-end ones seem to be earlier in the winter.

Widespread damaging ice storms are pretty rare whereas the localized ones are more common for obvious reasons. An often-overlooked biggie was Dec 3-5, 1964....that was prob the benchmark for post-1950 ice storms in interior SNE until December 2008 happened. The December 1964 ice storm was particularly damaging across eastern NY State too. I think Albany had almost an inch of ice in that. But pretty much everyone from about I-495 up around Ray's area down to my area and out to E NY got absolutely crushed. The ice even got into BOS in the latter half of the system and produced significant accretion but it was nothing like it was over the interior. One of the unique things about the December 2008 ice storm was that unlike most of the other monsters on the list, it was fairly short-lived. It happened mostly over a 12-18 hour period. Most places had only minor accretion during the day on 12/11....and then all hell broke loose overnight and it was done by 7-8am the next morning.

Mostly confined to Litchfield county...so I don't think it can be considered in the same league as a storm like 1921. It was pretty devastating where it stayed ice though....just not a huge area like some other storms.

Update: NSIDC SIA was 3.24 million sq km on 9/11.....this is 40k above the minimum of 3.20 million sq km several days ago. There is still a chance we could set a new minimum being that close, however, the lower concentration ice near the pole is starting to rapidly freeze and there have been some slight gains in the Beaufort over the weekend, so this will make it hard to dip much more....the losses in the still-vulnerable ESS will have to be higher than the gains elsewhere. NSIDC extent currently sits at 4.82 million sq km. This is slightly above the min (so far) of 4.80 million sq km. This has a better chance than area to dip back below the min, but no guarantees on that either.

I mean it almost happened again in 2008. It was just a more marginal airmass in ‘73. You have to walk a fine line between too much cold (which causes more sleet/snow) and not enough like ‘08 south of ORH. Usually a pretty epic setup happens once per decade or 15 years and then you have to see if you cash in. We really haven’t had a great setup in a while so we’re kind of due. 12/23/17 was close but not quite.

Yeah that one was very widespread too. Got into BOS and PVD. Tolland prob came close in Nov 2002 as well but the real high-end stuff was more in NW CT. I think Tolland prob had more like a third to a half inch of accretion in that one. There was another in early January 2005 that dropped similar amounts to the 2002 event in N CT at elevation…we actually had mostly/all snow in ORH in that one with like 8-10”.

Yeah typically you want to see about 500m of below freezing to start refreezing into ice pellets, but there are caveats which often apply to New England ice events…hence the frequent ice events where the layer is more like 800-1000m thick….if the warm layer is greater than 6C, then you will not refreeze into ice pellets. This happens a lot in our siggy icing events…we’ll be blasting +8 to +10C at 850 while we wedge a cold layer of -5 or -6C at 925 underneath it (translating to -2 or -3 at the sfc…or -1C in the case of 2008, lol) On the flip side, if you have a warm layer that is merely +1 or +2C, you will have a hard time getting straight ZR and usually that’s a scalp-fest.

That is mostly correct for down here too....the rare in-situ icing event with light SE winds or something is when you'll actually see the CT River valley hang on the longest. Usually these events aren't huge though because they only last a few hours and below freezing layer is very thin so accretion is not very efficient. If we're talking situations where an ice storm warning may be necessary, it's almost always going to be worse with elevation (at least up to a point like you said...usually around 2k feet or so)

I remember at 1200 feet in Paxton had at least half an inch of ice one of the days when the cold drain came pretty far south. I think the whole town lost power for a while….similar in Holden. We had a light glaze in ORH at 600 feet where I was at the time…but even up on the hills above 800 feet you could see significantly more.

Saw this in the Dec '08 ice storm....FIT and Leominster at 300-400 feet were covered in over an inch of ice and looked like a war zone....you went up to the other side and even areas at like 800-900 feet near ORE and Athol had trouble accreting more than a tenth or two.

I started figuring it out in the early '90s when we had some ice events and on the weather channel local forecatss when they showed the nearby obs, Chicopee Falls and Hartford and Windsor Locks were always like 34F and raining. I kept thinking "I remember reading that valleys are supposed to keep the ice longer, why are they always warmer in these events?" Then I remember Harvey cam eon in an event maybe in the mid'90s and explained that the coldest layer of the atmosphere was actually around 1500-2000 feet in an ice event, and that is when it started really clicking....the soundings later on just confirmed when I had started learning.