ORH_wxman

-PNA/-NAO can be a high stakes pattern....you can get strong gradients. We talk about great stretches like December 1970, but you go south a bit and there was almost nothing...but on the north side of the mean boundary, it was prolific snows. The NAO migrating west makes me think that over time, the gradients will be pressing south...it starts out kind of north, and then sinks. Going deeper into climo winter will also help as well.

Or press it south 50-100 miles and it's pretty fun the whole time...some of the other guidance has that.

Having a primary low up in lake huron is pretty useless.

I've said it before and I'll say it again....many of our most prolific stretches have come during -PNA/-NAO patterns.

There’s a leading shortwave we need to watch for 12/24...could bring a round of light snow...then the main wave on 12/25. Both systems are kind of all over the place on model guidance...euro doesn’t really have much on 12/24 and then looks pretty torchy for 12/25...meanwhile other guidance has both distinct waves and is much colder.

You coastal guys are due for a few more disaster systems. We’ll chew on 12/26/12 and 12/29/12 while you wait for the PNA to get better.

We actually saw the NAO kind of merge with higher heights in the east in December 2012 for a time.

That’s definitely a possibility but it doesn’t happen very often. You usually need a big phasing event.

He posted a delta map. Not anomaly map. It was an intentionally deceptive post to generate a response.

Yes. There was a massive cutter Xmas Eve.

NWS Taunton had a snow depth of 8 inches on Xmas. Depth of 7 inches on 12/26. 4 inches on 12/27...then wiped out by 12/28. I double checked further south too at east wareham coop and they had very similar numbers.

There’s no way it was wiped clean Xmas morning there. The torch storm didn’t happen until the 27th.

Euro actually has some decent front end snows for outside 128 predawn Xmas morning.

Yeah the Canadian would work. That storm is likely to get squashed south of the block, the question is exactly how far south and that makes all the difference.

I dunno. Pre-Xmas was always precarious even if still possible. It’s not like guidance is pushing back the blocking. If anything, guidance has improved since a week ago....remember when the SE ridge was poking into SNE on all the longer range guidance about a week ago? You don’t see that now.

Yeah he was talking about the temp drift which we mentioned a couple pages back. I was commenting how ORH was 33F but all the mesonets were 31F...the ice sensor plus the pictures from here basically prove that the temp sensor is junk right now.

Yeah it wasn’t 32-33F that whole time.

Up on winter hill today and everything is iced over. Even 100-200 feet lower had nothing.

That storm was brutal for me. We had about 7” of sand where I was in ORH but my current location just to the east had about 16”. That mesoband you see in the last radar image posted by 4 seasons just rotted and I was smoking exhaust to the west. I did get in on it initially which literally dropped like 3” of snow in 90 minutes but then it slid east quickly and rotted. That’s why my current place had so much more. I guess I can’t complain too much though...the day after the storm I had to drive to Springfield MA and they had almost nothing...just a dusting. They basically got shutout. The snow dropped off really quickly about 10-20 miles west of ORH.

Could be very similar actually. But at least this one has a more realistic chance of trending south and colder because you have an active retrograde of the NAO block occurring.

Yeah best cold is east. Though there is definitely something up with ORH temps...running warm for a while now. There’s about a 0% chance they are actually 33F

Xmas is still somewhat interesting. Wish we had a stronger push of cold but at least there NAO block is actively retrograding while that system approaches so there’s room for models to correct better on that one unlike the previous system. Not holding out a lot of hope but not tossing yet. And while no OP model shows this right now, I noticed that several ensemble members on both EPS and GEFS eject some energy for 12/24 so a few of them had something for that day instead. The flip side of the equation is that if the NAO block doesn’t press down as much, we could still have flamingos and parrots for Xmas.

Pants tent pattern on both EPS/GEfS post-Xmas.

There’s at least a pretty strong established NAO block though. So I have a little more hope for that one to end up colder/south than this one did. We could smell the north trend on the 12/18 system coming from days away. Limiting factor is we don’t have an exceptional antecedent airmass but it’s better than this past system. One thing to root for is that northern stream piece of energy that we were hoping would phase for the 12/22 system...root for that to be as far south as possible even though the 12/22 system is toast. By doing that, it will shove the arctic cold further south and set the stage for something interesting on Xmas.

Your area may be the jack. Powderfreak commented on the BL flow helping out there being out of the east.