ORH_wxman

December 1970 looked a lot like that.

Your guess is prob as good as mine. But there are some good signs that it will be around for at least 2-3 weeks....the PV really gets stretched and takes a good hit, so that will want to promote blocking sticking around for more than just a week or so....the weeklies have been hinting at this staying around for a few weeks as well....and the ensembles have been showing a very strong signal for so far out in the run. Usually when you add all those up, it's a sign that the pattern isn't just a 7-10 day transient blip....we're likely going to have the blocking around well into January. But as we all know, LR forecasting is the ultimate humbling hobby, so things could change.

18z NAM wasn't just north, but it was weaker with confluence, so you dont get that nice fronto thump....the precip is more diffuse. Hopefully it's just a happy hour sauce run....but who knows. I do expect this to trend north at some point, but my hope is that we get a few ticks colder before that happens.

LOL....that one was painful....still a good storm, but man, what could have been. This blocking with non-arctic air pre-Xmas is kind of similar to that look though....at least in our half of the CONUS....the west is far colder than that year because of the monster EPO/-PNA combo.

The woods behind my house has a ton of oaks...so even though I had the yard pristine 3 weeks ago, there are a lot of stragglers that blew leaves into the yard. Really annoying actually.... But anyways, EPS going full nuclear into January is nice:

Yeah no snow pack to protect....lol. I want it 70F...I'd like to make one final pass with the leaf blower. Especially if Saturday is going to end up on the snowier side.

IF we clear out good, MOS will prob be off by at least 6-8F.

The pattern near us is kind of like Dec 1995 in that several days leading into the Dec 19-20 storm. 850 temps weren't even that cold but the sfc was since we had a mean high to our north. Like, here's the Dec 19, 1995 map....

I mean, it's a valid point....usually that pattern would be colder but we haven't had the initial advection of arctic air south so we're dealing with a more marginal airmass pre-Xmas. But as long as storms are shove south of us, we'd still be snow in that setup. 850 climo by Xmas is about -6C or -7C....so hovering a degree or two above that with storm tracks to our south will work....but if a storm tries to hug or cut west, it could be a bigger issue.

Many further south will have to wait until the good stuff advects in from the plains post-Xmas, but those 850 anomalies are totally fine for snow up in NE as long as you squashing storms south of us.

Yep...I was looking even further into the future....but it's already pretty well established before that....even back to around 84-96 hours it's well under way. D10, it's pretty mature and that's a party time look.

What a monster ridge near Bering sea.....and then a monster -NAO block on the other side of the pole.

Still gotta watch the 12/24-12/25 potential

This is actually a really good loop....the midlevel center obviously has trended solidly north in the past few runs....but notice how out to the east in the gulf of maine, the 850 temps haven't moved much....which shows the confluence working. The last frame has solid southerly flow at 850 while the first frame was actually out of the north in that area....but yet not a big difference in temps. That's what you want to see for a classic several hour thump. Only limiting factor in the antecedent airmass is pretty crappy....otherwise this would probably be a decent thump down to even near NYC instead of BOS-ORH being near the line.

You want a stronger thump to get anything worthwhile....with a marginal profile, a lighter precip shield was going to be pretty useless outside of the interior hills. That's why both the main shortwave and the confluence trending stronger at the same time is a better solution.

That's funny that NARCAN is a lot more generous at 00z than you'd expect but less generous down there at 12z. That run looked definitively snowier to me down there than those snow maps would suggest.

I'm not sure I follow....below HFD-PVD is less than 00z? 00z had basically nothing south of them....and 12z had several inches.

00z had no snow south of HFD-PVD....this run has a few inches down in that zone.

No way to know if we get a storm or not in the 12/23-25 timeframe.

Yeah it is kind of competing narratives....colder usually means further south with precip, but in this case it does not. The main shortwave is actually stronger than 00z but the confluence to the north is also stronger....so the two trends combined produce a colder outcome but also a more robust precip shield......which is ideal. You want a juiceir shortwave but also not at the expense of cold....the way to get that is to also trend the confluence stronger.

Looks definitively colder than 00z....but the precip shield is a bit more robust so it gets NNE better than 00z.

Yeah I'm hoping for another tick or two south before the north trend in the final 48-60 hours. This a pretty nice hit for the pike region and northward....but even well down in CT gets advisory snows before it flips to pellets/ZR.

Perfect timing for indigestion over Quebec.

Yeah this is gonna be cold...starts as snow in almost all of CT.

There's a scooter shitstreak in Quebec that is helping shove it south still at 72h.