ORH_wxman

I might be able to make this one. No guarantees, but optimistic.

Next week will definitely have some chillier days. Might be two cold pushes....one Sunday through Tuesday....then maybe a relaxation Wed/Thu and then another next weekend. We'll see how it plays out. I wish Sunday's cold push was a little stronger....ideally we'd get a hard freeze either Sun night or Mon night to kill the bugs and then go back to above normal temps, but it looks more like lows in the 30s and not quite a freeze except for the typical rad spots.

2009-2010 wasn't "Cold" here...it was slightly above average. But 2015-2016 was an absolute furnace. '09-'10 was cold though over a large portion of the country that does not include New England. December 2009 was quite cold. Like for ORH, December was about -1.5 departure, January was almost dead average, and Feb was +2 so it averages out to a pinch above normal but 2015-2016 was +12 (all time warmest December), +2.5, and +3.5....which makes the entire winter 6 degrees warmer than 2009-2010.

The 2009-2010 and 2015-2016 winters were not alike at all. 2009-2010 was cold across most of the conus including into the mid-Atlantic and southeast...even if where we were was a bit above normal. It was a lot snowier than 2015-2016 too across most of New England. The patterns were completely different.

No, all the stations with longer periods have record highs of 85+ for today.

Correct. PEople need to distinguish between what "They think" and what the official thresholds are. For NWS tracking, 33-36F is a frost.

12/16/07. That storm will live in infamy. I had a 3-6” forecast back then (and I was a little more bullish than other outlets)...only took about 3 hours to get obliterated.

Huge December and then it faded somewhat...esp south of pike. Same winter where we had the epic traffic disaster in the December 13th storm that came in like a wall mid/late morning.

Yep. I posted in the October thread that very warm Sept/Octobers do not scare me at all (if anything they are a good sign for winter)...a torch November would spook me a little but even those aren’t a death knell. We start looking up toward AK once we get into mid-November. We basically just want to avoid a developing death vortex up there. One-eyed pigs are what scares us.

Top 5 warmest Sept/Oct combos for BOS: 2017 1971 2007 1947 1961 Snowfall for those following winters were all above average. Sept/Oct warmth definitely does not scare me. November torches scare me more.

Oct 2017 was even warmer.

The SSTA pattern in the North Atlantic that shows up in 1995 and 2010 is called the North Atlantic tripole. You have warm up near Greenland, cold pool off new foundland and then warm again to the south of there. Its much more distinct in 2010 than 1995 which is kind of cold up near Greenland but there’s a small area of warm water near davis strait.

Wow that is utterly brutal for ORH. Exactly one ensemble member is above average.

Do you have a zoom-in of Ray's graph? His was a forecast, this looks like "Year to date" last winter.

I love how it has 44" for HFD and 39" for ORH.

It’s gotta be pretty close right? Off top of my head this is what I have since Ray joined before ‘06-07 winter: 2006-2007: Kevin 2007-2008: Ray 2008-2009: Ray 2009-2010: Kevin 2010-2011: Ray? (Not 100% sure on this one it was close) 2011-2012: Kevin 2012-2013: Kevin 2013-2014: Ray 2014-2015: Ray 2015-2016: Kevin 2016-2017: Kevin 2017-2018: Ray (you were leading all winter until Ray deformed you in the 3/13 storm) 2018-2019: Ray 2019-2020: Ray (this one may have been really close too but Ray got crushed in the Dec 1-3 storm so I’m guessing he had more?) 2020-2021: Kevin Thats 8-7 and either of you might be ahead because a couple of them were super close that I can’t quite remember who had more.

I honestly haven’t been looking that closely. I will look closer usually later in the month, but I’ve always preached that getting seasonal forecasts right even 60% of the time is extremely difficult. We have a favorable ENSO state so that is going for us...we’re also kind of due for a good pacific. We’ve had kind of crappy PAC the past couple winters and it looks like a weakish QBO going into winter. That at least won’t hinder a poleward AK ridge.

I’d like to see the H5 look on those. None of these are all that accurate from this time range but the 2m temp forecasts are even less accurate than the upper air stuff. Scooter and I still make fun of those seasonal models in autumn 2014 that (correctly) predicted a monster EPO ridge over AK but had like +2 temps from the northern plains to NE. How does the model even reconcile that?

I’d rather not see a torch November because there is a significant correlation to November temps and winter, but it’s certainly not ironclad. There are plenty of exceptions. 2010-2011 is a great example. 2004-2005 is another.

I mean, that really screwed up models last year too. PV was weak almost all winter and LR model guidance was atrocious. The SSW last winter was the Mortal Kombat fatality in February for some of the longer range stuff. It just shows how sensitive guidance can be to some of this stuff.

It only needs to shift a bit southeast for New England to look a lot better. You’d get something like a 2007-2008 pattern or maybe 2016-2017.

Yeah nobody uses sigma so it sounds weird but if the met community started embracing it, then it would eventually sound normal. Problem is the percentage anomalies are just way too popular to abandon even though they aren’t super useful. They don’t tell us much without peaking at the baseline and variance (which standard deviation has covered).

Get the AK ridge more poleward and it fixes a lot of issues. Esp up here.

This is the time of year we all get fired up or depressed over seasonal model outputs. It will all be forgotten in 6 weeks.

Yeah it would be more useful if the community embraced standard devs. Like “this looks like roughly a 1 sigma above normal snowfall winter for BOS to BTV”....one sigma for BOS is prob like 150% of normal while in Stowe it might be 115%.