ORH_wxman

BOS had almost 6” in the 12/20 event so they are BN but not horrifically like other spots further west. Just south of BOS is really bad on the south shore right on the coast.

Both can be true. We have a faster flow which maybe makes certain types of setups less frequent….but that maybe only explains a small percentage. Getting a +EPO might explain the majority of it. It’s like the snowfall argument…it’s an empirical fact we warmed between 1950-2020 but our snowfall empirically increased as well. So something else was offsetting the warming…was it extra water vapor? Yes, that explained prob a small percentage of it…but most of it was likely explained by natural variability and we just managed to get into a nice pattern of -AOs and -EPOs during that 2000s/2010s snow blitz. The extra 7% of water vapor in the atmosphere probably enhanced the nice pattern but it didn’t cause it.

That’s called a Miller B. We had about a century’s worth of them in the 2000s/2010s. Definitely not as many the last 3-4 winters.

GFS tries for a SWFE at D10. I almost forgot what those look like.

Yeah E Wareham is decent. Not close to pristine but pretty solid. I think their avg is around 39-40” since the turn of the century but long term avg is likely closer to about 35-37”. Much of the cape is likely low 30s and trending to upper 30s near the canal for longer term averages.

His map is based on coop data which is notoriously unreliable unless you know that coop is dedicated for snowfall. It’s too bad that a lot of coops degraded as we went through the years. Ironically, they were more reliable in days of yore when people didn’t travel as much or were home more often to do measurements at the right time (i.e. after snow ended or changed over and not the next morning when half of it might be washed away or compacted) N Foster coop is actually a good one though. Some of those coops north of them in MA near Milford and my region are horrific….usually at least 20-30% low. Maybe more. There’s precisely a 0% chance that southern ORH county averages near 40” a season…the worst spots there are prob in the 53-55” range and you have to be in the pit of the blackstone valley to get those numbers. Once you are at like 600-800 feet in Oxford/Southbridge/Douglas/etc, you’re gonna be near or over 60”. But sadly the bad coops are the only official data available so when you make a map, you’ll go with that unless you personally know certain areas are wrong. That’s a very nicely detailed map 4seasons has but I’d prob augment a lot of spots in S MA and NE CT.

NAM is def trying…it’s putting a pretty distinct inverted trough into New England.

Yeah the magnitude of the winds really made a lot of other points moot. CA definitely has horrendous forest management which will continue to contribute to their fires, but I’m not sure how much difference it would’ve made in this instance. Maybe the fire doesn’t get quite as hot which helps on the margins for spreading, but with those winds, you were screwed regardless.

I might have to stop lurking on Twitter and start trolling him.

Yeah ORH broke the 2001-2002 seasonal warm record in back to back winters these last two years with a bad thermometer. No other first order SNE site has either of those winters as top dog. They were torch winters, just not record-breaking but we will erroneously think they are going forward. I think BOS set their warmest July on record in 2019 with an even worse thermometer. That was right before they corrected it but the record still stands today.

18z euro still really driving that N stream down. Produces a general light snow over New England. Best is N of pike and into NNE but everyone sees something. But N of pike is maybe 1-3”. Maybe we can trend this into 2-4” instead. Not sure I can get remotely excited about a C-1” deal

Who the hell is that guy and why would he issue a blizzard watch almost a week out?

This is more of a semantics argument. I think Don is really just saying “this behaved a lot like other storms on model guidance that would easily hit us at D6-7”….you see some actual hits in the Op runs plus a bunch of close calls and the ones that weren’t hitting us were trending in a good direction until they weren’t. But there was a time where it looked very realistic. It wasn’t a clown range fantasy or something like the GGEM continuously showing the storm at D5-7 but no other guidance agreeing with it. It behaved like many systems that would hit us. But that’s part of the challenge in this field….we aren’t smart enough to calculate millions of perturbations in the atmosphere…otherwise we wouldn’t need model guidance.

Yeah we lost the blocking that retrograded from Scandinavia. I actually would've liked to see that stay because it's a nice orientation for us....but I'd gladly roll the dice with that newer look too.

NAM def trending signficiantly deeper with the northern stream while dragging the southern vort more....just like it's daddy, the Euro.

Little vort rotating down....18z NAM now has it too and gives BOS a few tenths of snow.

That's very hard to do in February. Average highs are well into the low 40s by the end of the month in Boston. So to have over half of the days below 32F for a high is really putting up some cold anomalies.

Yeah you have a little bit of WAR showing up.

1980s had some good march storms. They were pretty awful other months though. March 2013 through 2019 was a pretty good period. 2014 was annoying because it was like a top 5 coldest March but we couldn’t buy snowfall. NNE cleaned up though that month. We came close to a historic big dog in March 2023 but that nipple low really killed us in eastern MA.

I was walking to the seaport every day for work from south station that winter and even Boston harbor was completely frozen until late March. At the peak of it in late February and early March, you couldn’t see open water looking out east. I think it was frozen solid at least 5-6 miles out when we looked at satellite. The of course it was frozen much further than that when you looked at Cape Cod Bay and Nantucket sound. You could prob walk from Ptown to MVY in a straight line that month…right over the bay and across the mid cape and then across the sound.

ORH and BDL set their all time monthly cold records. BOS would have if the station was Logan airport the whole time but they narrowly missed out on the old station record which was inland a bit.

The crazy part about that pattern is we left a couple events on the table too. That’s how favorable they setup was. We had that 1-2” event on 1/31 that was trying to blow up and give us 6-10/8-12 briefly on some guidance…ended up destroying downeast Maine instead…and some of the second half of February stuff didn’t quite amplify but it was there for the taking. Not that we could ever complain about it’s amazing how many shortwaves just wanted to produce. The craziest one is still the 2/7-2/9 event…I remember a bit over a week out we were all saying “could be a brief milder period with a bit of thawing before we reload”…and yeah, like 90% of the country did torch for a few days but that arctic boundary draped SE from Canada over New England and we ran those ripples of low pressure under it and we stayed cold. I remember the first day or two of that event it was like 70F just south of DC and well into the 60s in S NJ. Crazy how it broke in our favor….now we’re paying for it.

See if they can do that for ORH and BDL too. We might need to wait for them to degrade a further half degree to be outside of the “calibration error” of 2F. I still can’t believe that’s the tolerance interval. Does anyone ever talk about that or do we just pretend that being off 1.5F is normal?

I dunno, the excitement of seeing the low shift from Buffalo to Detroit might keep us on the edge of our seats. We know all the weenies in Detroit and Milwaukee are dueling it out.

This is like viewing the Mansfield stake at 3300 feet…except it was BOS. What a 6 week stretch. You even had these little refreshers too mixed in with the big dogs.