ORH_wxman

They must have gotten some kind of waiver. Check out “west ridge road” up on Stratton. The entire thing is above 2500 feet with some spots above 2600.

Yeah I think we need to investigate the man-made snow contamination aspect of the W.E maps. I’ve been looking at several maps this evening from different dates and notice the peak itself really sticks out like a sore thumb....I know that any elevation is going to stick out but it seems pretty zonked.

They have them up around 2600 actually. I think they are more like million dollar houses, lol...but they are really high. I’ve looked before.

Yeah it def favors storms staying south of us...of course the irony being when we needed it most (Friday night and early Saturday), we couldn’t get it to squeeze south of us and keep us snow. Usually you’ll get a storm or two that will try to run up into that block and produce for us...instead we just got skunked a few different ways.

That’s interesting that Stratton might be similar or even better for W.E. I wonder if Stratton really rakes it in more in synoptic storms and then is only marginally worse in upslope? That would help explain the W.E. differences. One thing to keep a note in...Stratton has trails going around a good portion of the mountain so I wonder how much snow making contamination is in the NORHC maps? Something to consider too.

You would’ve thought we could score at least 1 or 2 half-decent events out of this. I’ll consider us fortunate that the NAO isn’t going away any time soon and we’ll get to take some more hacks at it with a better cold source.

Ahh ok makes sense...yeah that’s how ridiculous that winter was, lol...we already had smashed 30 day snowfall records just over 2 weeks into the blitz and another major storm was on the way.

What’s the reference point on those dates? They definitely aren’t the “max snow in a 30 day period” that winter because BOS had 90.2” between 1/24 and 2/15 which is just over 3 weeks.

Doesn’t look like we’re getting a +PNA again any time soon but a bit of Rockies ridging would help. Looks like that happens the last several days of the month which may help those threats a little more after the 1/26 one. The 1/26 threat itself is still on the table but the upside seems somewhat limited due to a lack of ridging in the Rockies. Not that most people here would even turn down an advisory event if offered, lol.

I’ve always wondered how much snow would be measured if someone was up in the Glastonbury wilderness NNW of Woodford in those 3000+ foot peaks. Like that would be an amazing spot for a ski resort. The terrain there looks insane for upslope. I feel like they’d easily get over 200” per year there but there is nobody there to measure it. Lol.

I’d take Feb 63 and Feb 64...’60 was meh (though I’d gladly take it if it meant a we get a 3/3/60 repeat) and Feb ‘87 was an absolute nightmare.

Looks a lot like late January ‘69/early Feb ‘69. We got abused for like 3 weeks before the Lindsay Storm finally happened even though the pattern never really changed that much. I feel like one of those late month threats will pan out but maybe we just get tortured for another week or two.

Weeklies went wild with the -AO/NAO well into February. If that is correct, we’re either in for more torture or a lot of fun. Can’t punt with that look. (Well I guess you can but it’s like punting on 4th and 2 at your opponent 40 down by 7 with 4 min to go)

Yep. We get to keep rolling the dice...as long as you are rolling you have a chance. As I mentioned earlier, frustrating to keep missing recently but can’t fold the tent yet with that look.

Man, that looked like a carbon copy of 1/12/11 in the making. Almost identical shortwave setup. Would’ve been nice to see another panel or two just for the eye candy.

Future yellowjackets nest.

Niña is fast flow gradient with shortwaves getting sheared. Thats happening in the upcoming pattern but December and first half of this month had a lot of slow blocky flow...we actually had too many shortwaves at times starting to pile up on each other causing destructive interference which screwed us out of a couple events.

Woodford def gets smoked but that report was pretty weenie-ish even in that context. I think Mitch (wxmanmitch who lives in Woodford) was a bit skeptical of it.

Usually cold FL happens in El Niño though there are exceptions like 2010-2011. We talked about how much this past 6 weeks has looked like El Niño and not La Niña so the cold FL makes sense in that regard.

This is actually what keeps me somewhat skeptical of the resignation by many that February will be bad for snow lovers. Sure, I admit it might, but this SSW hasn’t manifested yet in the troposphere and it still could throw a wrench into February. Some of the longer term guidance shows the AO/NAO region starting to act a bit stubborn as we head deeper into February so maybe we we get something like a -WPO/+EPO/-PNA/-NAO/-AO pattern....those can be good (See February 1969) or they could still suck but I think we still have to wait and see what happens with that SSW impact.

There’s the longwave pattern and there’s the shortwaves embedded in it. We know what favorable longwave patterns look like. We have a good history of them. Longwave patterns are more predictable in advance. We have no idea what shortwaves will do until we get closer. There are examples of favorable longwave patterns that didn’t deliver (See January 1985). There are also examples of unfavorable longwave patterns that did. (See January 2006 for interior SNE) When meta discuss the “pattern”, they are almost always talking about the hemispheric long wave pattern. Usually we will specify when we’re talking scales smaller than that.

We’re in it this week. I mean, this isn’t a model phantom like last January. It’s going to occur. Here is the D3, D5, D8 and D11 N Hemisphere map H5 anomalies. You can see smaller scale problems on the closer maps inside of a week...smaller scale is obviously unpredictable at longer time ranges...but the -EPO/-NAO pattern is happening

Agreed that we’re not static, however I’d push back on assuming that CC means less snow here, at least in terms of where we are now on the timeline. The empirical evidence thus far actually points to the opposite conclusion. Eventually the warming would reach a point where it becomes more dominant than the “higher precipitation” signal which is driving the increased snowfall in the past couple decades.

One of the least snowiest Januarys on record....pattern wasn’t even that bad either kind of like this year. It wasn’t as torchy but slightly above average temps. Of course we all know that things turned around in Feb ‘69.

Without the -NAO we would have had an epic winter heat wave. Some of the objective analogs for the hemispheric pattern earlier this month were early January 2007....people might remember many spots hit 70F during that one. The only thing different this time was a west based NAO block that kept us in the 30s for the most part with well above average low temps. It was actually not a bad snow pattern, we just couldn’t get any of the shortwaves to cooperate....very narrowly missed a good one on 1/3-1/4 and then missed another chance on 1/12.