ORH_wxman

Yeah not sure why he’s implying the PAC looks like those composites. The PAC looks way worse than that over the next 10-12 days...now, it may improve after that, which is reason to get more optimistic assuming west-based blocking develops.

It’s often behind the grinch storm we typically see, lol. But there wasn’t much cold behind this one. Doesn't look like any true arctic air for the foreseeable future. May have to wait until mid-month or later.

EPO never gets great on weeklies but it doesn’t have to if the NAO/AO ends up like it depicts. It goes into a bit more of a neutral state and the PNA ridging pops a little more. It’s not a cold pattern up here but it is a good one for snow events. Definitely a cold pattern down south though. Weeklies could be wrong though. They don’t have a lot of skill beyond week 3.

Weeklies gone wild from mid-January onward....PAC gets better and NAO blocking looks more classic. Let’s hope it is right.

Yeah this makes sense. A strong NAO/AO with a garbage PAC basically lets you barely tread water in the northeast. Though you could prob do a little better if the block is specifically in the Davis Strait area... The PAC hopefully gets less hostile by 1/10...even just a mediocre PAC with a good NAO would do pretty well during peak winter temperature climo.

At least 1/4 has a better airmass than 12/5 so interior would prob be ok but it needs some help aloft with the intensity.

Assuming GEFS is correct. EPS not as enthused though they still do improve somewhat toward the end of the run.

True crippling ice storms are pretty rare. We get a lot of nuisance ice events and even semi-regularly we get moderate ice events in the interior. But they almost always fail to reach half an inch of accretion. (Radial measurement, not flat...big difference which causes confusion on here sometimes) You usually want a mesolow poking NE or NNE off the coast to really lock in the cold/dry dewpoint drain to offset the latent heat release of ZR. When the mesolow is oriented and poking more E or ENE, then it becomes harder to sustain the cold drain. So you’ll get some ZR for sure on that look, but then it ends up slowly going to 33F rain. You also need the QPF. Accretion efficiencies are often in the 0.7 range or even lower on moderate/heavy precipitation, but they will be much higher on light freezing rain. That’s also why many of the bigger ice storms come in waves of lighter precipitation that lasts for a couple days (or even longer like the 1998 ice storm in NNE)

Stop looking at those damned charts and see the pattern. EPO sucks but the NAO is a fraud -NAO. It’s not a west-based Davis Strait or even Hudson Bay block. It’s eastern Greenland to Iceland ridging with a vortex over Baffin Island...in scientific technical lingo, that’s called a dogshit negative NAO. They can be ok when the PAC is mediocre but not when it is hostile. Previously, model guidance showed a true Davis Strait block which was going to offset the shitty PAC.

It was a slow trend toward the icier scenario on the euro but still not enough for big impact...maybe up into W ME. Some front end ice too for interior CNE.

Ukie looks more like the 00z euro keeping the southern energy more consolidated and west so you end up with a cutter anyway albeit with CAD out in front of it...but wouldn’t be that much snow on that setup.

GEM is definitely an icy look over interior even if verbatim the 32F sfc isotherm doesn’t make it much past NH/MA border. Lot of mesolow showing up there. Still a bit skeptical until Euro gets on board but it’s plausible.

GEFS d15 pattern is definitely very good. But obviously not agreeing with EPS. For the first week of January, we will definitely have to hope for good NAO blocking to set up or we’re probably going to struggle with an AK vortex out on the PAC side.

Temporary one eyed pig setting up over AK early month too. We need the NAO to set up then or we’re gonna have a useless first week of January. It does look like the pig retrogrades west so it’s not locking in.

A majority are rainers on the EPS but you can still see quite a few wintry scenarios too mixed in. The spread is large.

Still crap (ensembles...06z operational doesn’t go out far enough)...though it’s slowly trending the right way. Problem on the euro is it keeps the energy pretty consolidated in the southern stream and then phases with another shortwave coming in behind it. It’s slow and consolidated compared to other guidance.

We’ll want to see the northern stream clear pretty far south ahead of the southern stream to have significant winter wx into SNE I think. Need the high to build in a real airmass otherwise it’s probably not enough down here. Having deeper cold push would help NNE get more snow too which they need badly.

Hard to go bullish on wintry wx until euro looks better. Most other guidance is coming on board though (Ukie/GFS/GGEM) with icing to at least interior CNE if not northern SNE. Problem is the euro is still holding a lot of that energy back and consolidating it allowing the storm to wind up to the west after the northern stream clears out. May or may not be its old bias in effect...but we’ll see.

Quite the change at 90h on 06z euro. Even compared to 00z

Feb 1950 was a big month too in the potent '49-'50 Nina. Best month of that winter after the warmest January on record (still stands as the record in many sites around here)

2001 was 2nd best month behind March.

Good La Nina Februarys (at least off top of my head for interior SNE)....2001, 1996, 1975, 1972, 1956. You could technically say 2011 and 2006 were good, but they were pretty choppy. I guess 1996 might fit in that group too. Feb 1956 would be the bullseye we are shooting for though. Monster month.

Yeah, it's just the timing of the epic grinch distorts the "feeling" of it. But I personally enjoyed Xmas eve a ton...it had the reggae weekend vibe at the ski resorts....we were burning the firepit outside with temps near 50F and deep snow cover. My son making and then destroying a snowman, lol. Xmas day itself though was a total bummer. No denying that. 2017 this was not.

This was admittedly worse than most grinches. There was deep snow cover across a huge percentage of the posting subforum after a pretty big time storm on 12/16-17....those types of storms don’t grow on trees, especially first 3 weeks of December. Then the progged NAO blocking for late December started to look crappier in the days approaching the grinch storm, which caused us to lose 12/29 and then recently it looks worse in early January. So a lot of people are playing the “pattern pushed back so it’s bogus” card. Even if that isn’t really sound reasoning.

Grinch storm broke a lot of people. Kind of ruined the vibe of the good start for many peeps...so I kind of get it. But that isn’t an excuse to start punting January. Especially when model guidance is all over the map...and these same models basically wanted to puke all over December too. Then they started getting optimistic, and then tried to pull the rug out again early in the month.... Remember all the panic of December not panning out after 12/5 disappointed some folks and they were complaining that the pig was coming back by 12/15 or 12/20? Lol...then we got a major snowstorm.