ORH_wxman

This is the 45th anniversary of the 12/29/76 storm....that really kicked off an amazing period for eastern MA...esp just barely W of BOS....like the 128 belt. This was Ray's dream storm. There was a band of 18-20" that went from N RI up through 128 belt....while ORH had 4".

It doesn't always mean doom though.....the blizzard sometimes ends a great pattern, but what happens in our good winters is that we don't get torched during the reshuffle. Think of the Feb 7-9, 2015 event when the rest of the country torched or the 1/18/11 front end thump to sleet/ice event after the NAO broke down post-1/12/11 blizzard and before the western PNA ridge popped to give us that great final 2 weeks of Jan 2011. My hope for this season (and Ray is prob thinking similar)....we enter a decent 2 weeks of neutral to slightly +PNA with a huge ridge over Bering/AK....then we start to reshuffle again, but perhaps that gets blunted by a -NAO forming....we very frequently see blocking return when earlier in the winter had big blocking. We'll see though....before we worry about ending a good pattern, lets actually get one first and get a damned warning event.

Sometimes the benchmark blizzard actually ends a great pattern....we've seen that many times.

Mean trough moves east by then so I think it will definitely help....wavelengths get a bit longer in January too which will help. We still have a monster ridge up in the Bering, so the cold supply is not going to be the issue assuming we move the mean trough eastward a bit. It's definitely not a one-eyed pig pattern.

Selling any frontal wave development....basically until inside 3 days and other guidance is on board.

Yeah I say luck too in place of "nuanced chaos" because most normal people will look at you like you have 3 heads when you start using that weird jargon. You can predict all the large scale features generally correct but be totally off on snowfall because of nuances in the flow. This goes back to my "loaded dice" post a couple weeks ago. You can play with loaded dice in your favor but still lose in the shorter term because the dice just happened to roll against you....just like you can beat the casino to a pulp at the roulette wheel for a night because the ball bounced in your favor a few times that night....but if you kept playing it, the casino will come back and beat you because the odds are tilted in their favor. Same exact idea applies to patterns....a pattern can be generally favorable, but nothing is 100%. We'd all definitely take a pattern that has a 60% chance of producing a big snowstorm over a pattern that has a 30% chance of producing one....but guess what? Sometimes the 30% pattern will produce one and the 60% pattern will not....but that does NOT mean we would take the 30% pattern again going forward. We admit we got "lucky" and hope the pattern gets better.

No reason to buy the anafrontal wave idea unless it's showing up on all guidance and closer lead time. There's a chance the initial system could trend cold enough for NNE to be mostly frozen, but other than that, we can probably punt until at least 1/7.

Yep..get the scooter snowblower ready and your shovel to attack it.

EPS actually pops a positive PNA (or close enough in terms of sensible wx pattern) in the 11-15….not buying it yet but that would be a welcome change. Esp since the NAO blocking is going away.

Euro is going full on Rainer into southern Canada. But where you are, I’d definitely still watch it for a colder solution in the next few days. We’re prob toast down here.

The 3rd low looks a bit like a fraud….maybe it’ll work out but imho the best chance is to trend the one before it into a classic overrunning/SWFE.

Alright enough of the bickering…I just deleted a bunch of junk.

The deeper PNA trough also caused the more amplified ridge into the south-central US (like TX/OK up into the lower MS valley) and that helped shred systems…if a few of these shortwaves stay slightly less shredded, you prob get a couple of warning events out of it.

Yeah the best match for the pattern in the second half of this month was Dec 1970….but nuances such as a slightly deeper PNA trough out west make a big difference. You can tell though just by looking at the pattern how it wouldn’t have taken much of a tweak to get a bunch of solid events.

Annual tradition around here…canceling winter in December. We’ve even had people doing it when December was decent (like last year)…lol.

Guidance could change too. It’s assuming we get a big cutter in there and that doesn’t always happen…esp in strong -WPO/EPO block that is going right into the North Pole…you can sometimes end up CADing the system. I know everyone is assuming the warm trend wins out because we’ve been getting mostly skunked but just as often you may see a trend of lowering heights in Quebec too.

Funny how their previous record December snowfall there in Tahoe was December 1970. Too bad we didn’t get that month back here.

That blizzard comment was just for him.

Yep. Maybe we can get a nice period like Jan 94 or late Dec 08 through mid Jan 09. Can get some Miller Bs in that pattern too but a little harder…nobody should have visions of monster blizzards dancing in their head.

They’ve done pretty well in the arctic but they definitely underestimated the PNA trough out west.

I think it looks quite good. Obviously we need it to verify…but I’m totally fine with that pattern. Big ridging in the Bering strait with weak SE ridging is actually pretty classic for active/snowy pattern in New England. It is cold too.

Here’s the progression…this is still pretty classic La Niña but at least we’re not digging the trough into palm trees down in Cabo San Lucas

Weeklies are pretty chilly for January. Hopefully we can start playing catch-up in the snow department.

ORH had about an inch of snow/ice OTG until yesterday.

It’s prob fairly close but I’ll bet “pit2” averages a bit more. But they can get skunked sometimes being right on the water in the wrong type of pattern…that’s why it’s close to begin with and once you go a few miles inland in Maine it increases rapidly….in a latitude gradient pattern they will do much better regardless.