ORH_wxman

Ray is going to watch like 3 Weymouth jacks this winter on OES enhancement in frigid airmasses.

Weak cold neutral would be fine too....both cold neutral and weak La Nina are favorable states for New England. I have a gut feeling we'll see the return of cold SWFEs this winter...ENSO state sort of supports it, but we're due for a frigid Canada after a couple of torch winters to our north.

Weak La Nina is definitely gaining steam in the model guidance

We're only superficially close on 2012 extent...NSIDC has us only 10k more, but JAXA and UBremen have us over 500,000 sqkm behind and we're also trailing 2012 by over 500,000 sqkm in area. NSIDC extent will eventually start lagging 2012 significantly. We won't finish close to 2012 given the current numbers. The ice is actually very compact right now which is not what you want to see when you are looking for a huge cliff in the coming weeks.

That dominant vortex on the asian side draws warmer air in from the Siberian mainland. You can see it show up well on the anomalies so far this summer. A reverse dipole like 2013 would have kept it colder.

This summer's pressure pattern isn't nearly as favorable for ice retention as the classic reverse dipole retention seasons (like 1996, 2006, or even 2013)....the core of the low pressure anomalies were on the North American side of the pole in those years whereas this year it's up on the Asian side in the Laptev/adjacent CAB. That's going to advect some milder air in at times from Siberia. It's still a lot better than last year though.

For the whole month, yes...but I think the first 13 days of 2009 were definitely colder than the first 13 of 2021.

Yeah I’m def more for the chill/relaxed vibe. We spend most of the week on the lake in Maine and usually bring the kids to storyland one day and that’s also when we stop in N Conway afterward on the way back.

My wife loves the general store there. We usually stop in once during our week-long vacation 30 minutes away in Maine. It’s a fun town to go into for an afternoon or maybe an evening for dinner, but I kind of side with Phin on not wanting to be there a long time. I start to get claustrophobic with some of the tourist crowds after a while. N Conway does have some sweet views though just walking around there.

Man, ORH running a -4.3 departure through 13 days this month. Not 2009 levels but still pretty cold compared to recent years.

I went to the Red Sox game the other day and took the green line from Riverside...I feel like about 20-25% weren’t wearing masks but nobody was enforcing it. My guess is they will probably drop the requirements in another month or two assuming there isn’t a big resurgence here.

Over 3.5" here now. Still getting hit good but the best is slightly NW at the moment.

Deluge

Getting smoked here

Definitely a semantics argument. Hard to believe you’d have a mass infusion of people that need to be hospitalized from another wave of covid without having deaths with it.

They won’t come back unless a big wave of people dying returns...which is unlikely in our region where like 80% of adults are vaxxed.

At this point (barring a minuscule minority of people who cannot safely take the vaccine), if you remain unvaxxed and get a serious case of covid, that is on you. Anyone who has wanted a vaccine has been able to get one with fairly minimal effort for a couple months now (longer in some areas).

My 5 year old had covid back in April and it was less severe than most colds he has had. We almost never found out but we decided to test him when he complained of a mild headache and had a low grade fever (around 100F) and there had been a couple cases in his daycare. The mild symptoms lasted maybe 2 days. My 2 year old never caught it from him despite us making no attempt to separate them. Guess it's that much harder for a 2 year old to catch it.

Just had a really nice storm come through.

ORH already at 56F. No monthly record low. Still a great shot at the daily record though. Kind of sucks that we couldn’t get the monthly record if it’s going to be this horrible.

Time to beat 1992 and 1978. Embrace the disaster.

I posted earlier that ORH has a legit shot at the all time July record tomorrow. 55F in 1978.

This is a crazy pattern. From impressive heat to epic cold for July. Gonna have to watch closely tomorrow...ORH legit could set an all time record low max for the month of July. Current record is 55F set on 7/4/78.

The warmth in Siberia probably will have the largest effect on the Laptev and East Siberian sea ice....because the snow cover there in northern Siberia melted out earlier this year and that helps push warmer air closer to the ocean. IF we were having a warmer year on the other side of the arctic where the Beaufort and Chukchi are, then we might have had a chance at a new record, but those seas are lagging way behind on the melt this season which will prevent a new record unless something really crazy happens. If we look at the average temps (listed below) in the arctic basin (north of 70N) in the Dec-Mar time frame, we see how warm it was for some of those seasons between 2014-2018 when we were really lagging on the refreezing in the Chukchi. But the last 3 winters have cooled back closer to the late 2000s baseline. The question is whether we spike back up quickly to the 2014-2018 levels or if it takes another decade or two to consistently get there again. The arctic can be notoriously volatile on temp swings. 2000 -18.706 2001 -19.469 2002 -18.780 2003 -19.126 2004 -19.802 2005 -17.880 2006 -17.321 2007 -18.124 2008 -18.628 2009 -18.553 2010 -17.506 2011 -17.678 2012 -17.581 2013 -18.566 2014 -16.554 2015 -18.181 2016 -15.655 2017 -17.128 2018 -16.510 2019 -17.756 2020 -18.734 2021 -18.239

We need winter temps to warm more to get to reliably ice free summers. Right now we are kind of in a new equilibrium where most of the ice is first year ice but the winters are still cold enough to freeze the first year ice to near it's maximum thickness (around 2m). We've been flat on volume since 2010. The minimums are mostly dependent on weather...specifically May and June weather which iswhy we can forecast the area mins somewhat accurately at this point. We saw some extremely warm winters in the 2014-2018 time frame, but the most recent 3 winters since 2019 have sort of reverted to the late 2000s baseline. We'll have to see if we see them spike back up.