ORH_wxman

Lol it’s definitely a small random town.

Even in Holliston I have 17” for the month with 15 days of snow cover so far. Both solidly above climo.

That's actually a decent PAC, look at that AK ridging. It's a classic massive poleward Aleutian ridge...-EPO/-PNA/-NAO pattern. The NAO is crucial there though for avoiding some cutters, but the PAC is keeping a lot of cold in Canada there.

A true davis strait block will trump a shitty PAC, but a garbage N ATL ridge won't. So it all depends on where it sets up.

Cancelling January is just as bad as locking in 2011 at this point. Guidance isn't consistent at all right now.

Euro did change a lot aloft though. It definitely made a step toward the less phased scenario even if t didn’t come all the way there. It wouldn’t take a whole lot more to bring the wintry scenarios into play. Check out 108h today vs 120h on the 00z run...notice up in Canada you see today’s run having a bunch of energy sheared out north of Lake Superior...that also causes the main trough to the south to become more elongated and positive tilted

Verbatim it’s mostly just in the high elevations but in reality it could be more widespread. I’d like to see the isobars orient the sfc front more NE to SW though for a classic icing event.

I’m not even sure what the 12z Ukie is doing now. It basically leaves about half the energy behind but still has some ejected into the southeast. Almost looks like it would have trouble even getting the storm this far north. That could be an icing setup though... Lol

Ggem whiffs on the phase too now but it still tries to track the low pretty far west. However, because it whiffs on the initial phase, it allows some high pressure to build in ahead of it so it starts to act more like a SWFE in NNE. Esp at the surface with icing. Trend that a little more and there could be a snowier solution on the table.

We had a massive fake-out on model guidance progged for MLk day and beyond. Looked almost like a 2015 patter and then it utterly vanished in mode guidance after being there for like a week. Thats’s when I personally felt the winter was screwed. This winter is pretty weird. The NAO is still in doubt but theres sign it eventually helps out...and if t doesn’t, there are some signs that the PAC may improve around 1/10 and beyond. Who knows for sure though. This hasn’t been a good winter for LR forecasting. Nobody saw the El Niño pattern coming from weeks out.

If you are grasping at straws, the 00z Ukie changed the setup for the New Years storm. Prob a decent winter storm brewing there at 144h for NNE anyway...unfortunately no other model shows this

Sounds kind of like voodoo. Only a couple days in the 40s would be a way below avg temp January..even in your hood. Our recent Januarys in the past 3 or 4 years have been pretty torchy though, so I can see the fatigue of warm Januarys. I guess 2019 wasn’t but all other years since 2015 have been.

Or late Jan ‘15/Feb ‘15

The models flip flopping badly gives some hope that they aren’t handling the entire evolution well in the N ATL. Hopefully one of these systems wave-breaks a nice block into the Davis Strait. Hopefully the weeklies actually have a clue and we pop that +PNA after about 1/10 because that would be a pretty nice pattern...+PNA/-NAO.

I mean, that’s pretty much every single winter in New England unless you are at high elevation and/or upslope region. Once in a blue moon we get winters where it’s fairly consistently good or the bad periods are short (‘00-‘01 is a good example) but they are the exception rather than the rule. A legit threat could still pop after New Years but it’s going to need more help I think than the models suggested a few days ago given the pattern deterioration.

NAO blocking isn’t progged like it was a few days ago. It’s well south of where it was so it doesn’t really help us. Still could change, but that’s the main reason it looks worse. PAC has always looked meh for early January.

Ensembles have steadily gotten worse each run for early January. We might be punting 3 weeks (roughly Xmas to Jan 10) if there’s no improvement.

The New Years storm has looked terrible for 2 or 3 days now. That’s a big time cutter again I think unless we get a major synoptic change (still plausible but increasingly unlikely) It’s amazing how far north that one is progged to warm sector again. That’s what has been weird about these cutters...not that they are simply cutters, we get those relatively frequently early in the season, but that they are literally pushing 50s into Quebec City with zero high pressure at all creating any resistance even in far northern New England. Meanwhile they are causing snow thicknesses deep into northern Mexico...LOL.

24 hour snowpack comparison (actually more like 25 hours...4pm yesterday to almost 5pm today)

I’d take the North Atlantic ridging with Feb climo wavelengths over a typical Feb La Niña gradient which often porks us. But who knows, maybe we get neither pattern and it’s a nice +PNA which is the best in February

Tropical dewpoints from the Bahamas visiting Quebec City again.

Jim Hughes. Don’t think i ever saw him after about 2008 or 2009. Hopefully he didn’t pass and just went elsewhere.

Prob just coincidence. Up here, in addition to 2011/2014, we had a monster on 1/4/18 that whiffed down in DC/BWI. We had a pretty good one on 1/7-8/17 too...and actually one of the few good storms that hit New England in 2010 that whiffed the mid-Atlantic happened on a retro job from Jan 1-3, 2010. Tamarack up in Maine loves to curse that storm as the end of that winter up there. Hopefully we score another good one this winter.

Your pack didn’t survive the Xmas eve 2007 cutter? I think we had like 8-10” of glacier afterward. However, the early January 2008 assault was like this...we rebuilt the pack to like 20”...very high water content too since it included that glacier from Xmas and all of it got wiped out in that Jan ‘08 attack.

Lol this is pretty funny. Not a bad analogy either. The SSW should be an accession to your Fraud Five. Like an honorable mention.