ORH_wxman

Feb ‘81 is the warmest February on record in a lot of northern New England sites. Absolute furnace of the month after one of the coldest Januarys on record.

Has the 1/6 storm too…you can see a mix of primary lows and secondary lows on the ensembles. That one def looks kind of like a SWFE/redeveloper…I think the higher end coastal potential is def in the timeframe you say…like between 1/8-1/12

We still got hammered pretty good in ORH. Prob was helped a bit by orographics and the strong BL flow but we had about 20 inches in that one. We never truly flipped to IP either…maybe almost a rimey mix of sleet and snow once the dryslot punched in but it wasn’t like further east where it went to pellets and ZR (and straight RA on the coast) before the dryslot. But yeah, it could’ve been 3 feet if it tracked better.

March is the time to go skiing up north. Can’t remember the last time the Xmas to New Years week was clean. Feels like it sucks or has some terrible days almost every year. Even going back to the glory years of winter that holiday week always seems to have problems. Though in your defense, Sugarloaf is often far enough north that even some crappy setups still do well there.

The EPS has the core of the cold anomalies over the TN valley…double digit negative anomalies at 850mb at 300 hours. That’s impressive for an ensemble mean that far out. Decent place for the cold anomalies too. Like @dendrite said, we prob don’t want them over our head in early January. Maybe in late Feb or Mar we do, but not early January if you want snow.

Yeah the frigid pattern actually started in mid-November 1989. There was a very brief interruption from a weak cutter a few days after Tday that year but otherwise it was pure frigid for like 6-7 weeks straight. One of the most vivid memories I have from that December was ice skating at Elm Park in ORH around Dec 10th or so. The ice was so thick already that you had it buckling near shore where the water was only like 6-8 inches deep and it had frozen to the bottom there. You prob couldn’t even ice skate on that pond by mid-January, lol.

Yeah that was to be one of the most extreme dichotomies in back to back winter months we’ve seen. Jan/Feb 1981 might be up there too.

It might work for a place like N ORH county. But you need to rip to allow the latent cooling in the lower 2-3k feet of the atmosphere. It often doesn’t really work out that way when you have no antecedent airmass…but storms like 12/5/20 did.

Look up January 1985…bith the hemispheric pattern and F6 data.

I mean, it’s like 10-11 days out. So yeah.

Euro was still pretty warm. But other guidance has definitely cooled a good bit in the last 24-36 hours.

Yeah that was a legit epic storm for NNE. I’d prob reserve the weenie terms like BECS as storms that are just utterly crushing for a really large area. 1888 comes to mind. Maybe 1978 as well. Feb 2013 was honestly not too far off but I think the forecast was pretty good on that storm and it mostly occurred on a Friday night/early Saturday so the societal impact was not quite as large as some of those others.

I haven’t had one in ORH either. Highest I’ve seen was Dec 1992 in Holden MA where we had 35”. There were legit 36-40” amounts in a narrow band in CT surrounded by a somewhat wider area of 30-36” in Feb 2013. But it’s a mesoscale band kind of similar to what happened in Dec 2020 when some narrow spots saw 36-42”. I think Xmas 2002 west of Albany had a narrow band of 36-42” also.

Yeah still out in clown range but it’s been semi-consistent on ensembles the last 2 days. I’d def classify 1/6-7 at the first widespread “chance”…hopefully it actually becomes a legit threat once we get into the middle of next week.

DT had 3 terms: SECS MECS HECS They were in that order too. Weenies added other ones over the years and they may have changed rankings but the original 3 were above and they went in that order. This is like circa 2000-2001

I just looped the entire month of Dec 1989 on reanalysis and it's amazing. The first time the 850 0C line makes it north of MA is 12/31/89 the entire month. Most of the month is spent double digit negatives at 850mb.

I think we'd want for 12/30 to phase more and be a deeper system as it cuts inalnd and that would push the boundary further south for 1/1. I think SNE is pretty cooked on 1/1, but NNE has a shot maybe. I suppose if it trended hard enough, we couldn't rule out rain changing to snow over the interior in SNE, but it's a long shot.

Honestly prob since Jan 2022 is the last time we saw something like that....and if you want to get specific on the more frigid look, it's prob been since 1/4/18 since we saw that look. Obviously those were both KU storms, and it's irresponsible to say we'll repeat, but that's the type of longwave flow you want to see for that type of higher end potential. But all of us would even take a run-of-the-mill 6-12" coastal right now. Hopefully we see some specific threats become more coherent on guidance as we get closer. It would suck if we can't time anything and end up cold/dry.

EPS seems to focus on Jan 1-2 (warm storm except maybe NNE) and then wait until 1/6 for the next event. GFS suite tries to maybe amplify 1/3 a bit on the heels of the Jan 1 storm. EPS still looks pretty active in that 1/6-1/10 period.

Yeah there’s definitely a difference between getting like 20-27” and 30”+. It’s really hard to break 30. There’s a reason you see so few of those numbers at first order sites.

30” storms are exceptionally rare for a single spot but there’s some climo favored areas and then climo disfavored areas. East slope of the northern Berkshires is prob the most climo-favored area in SNE. Next would prob be N ORH county. Both regions can do really well on deep layer easterly flow events. Next is prob interior SE MA. The one thing those 3 areas have in common is they can often be big QPF maximums in coastal storms. The first two are due to orographics and SE MA can wring out a bit extra due to the frictional low-level convergence of sticking out into the ocean. You’re not far displaced from the moisture source as a bonus. But I think the 2010s prob set the bar unrealistically high on the expectations of frequency on these storms. It’s still very hard to get…even in the climo favored areas.

It was really two events back to back but somehow got classified as one. I had nearly a foot of paste in ORH in the first one on Feb 23-24 and then almost all rain in the Feb 25-26 system. Berkshires got slammed with 2+ feet in the first one but had some ptype issues in the second but managed to grab a foot of sludge before grabbing additional snow after the storm occluded. Where it stayed all snow just west of Berkshires in the Helderbergs and Catskills they got 4 feet plus out of the two systems.

Ray might start posting blog updates while in the hospital right after new years. First a kind of classic SWFE on 18z gfs and then a longitude coastal (favoring eastern areas) after that.

Pattern Verification matters too. We had some excellent looks fail to materialize over the past couple years. So the great pattern never came. We did get a pretty favorable pattern (but not as good as what’s progged right now) in December 2022 for about 10-12 day period but we mostly struck out in SNE save for a light event on 12/11/22 I think it was…that was the infamous phase of the PV out west which turned a D6 snowstorm into the Buffalo blizzard. Last year we had many head fakes…WPO/EPO region always seemed to deteriorate as we got closer. That isn’t the case this time I don’t think. It’s been pretty consistent and we’ve already verified some favorable pacific look this cold season.

Ludlow is a really good spot. The old coop (now defunct) used to average almost 100” per year iirc. Can vary a bit depending on elevation there but generally that’s a solid spot in the middle of the greens. Most of the town is above 1,000 feet already.