ORH_wxman

Thing works amazing. Lol. Yeah November is not really a snow month anyway....but I still have zero faith in the weeklies these days. I need to see them go on a hot streak before believing them.

Time to break out the shovels!

Most of it IMHO is attributable to the AO....the AO region has been much more positive the past half-decade vs the 15 years before that (and especially the 2007-2013 timeframe). Now what is driving the AO? Whoever figures that one out wins the big prize....LOL.

Wagons east on Euro compared to 06z

There will be a bunch of local businesses crippled because of this. It's very sad. That's just going to be an economic reality of the covid protocols....a bit OT for this thread though. I do not think there needs to be a major limit on skiing though....this just doesn't spread well outside based on a huge sample size now, so I do not see the point. Nevermind when most people are actually wearing masks anyway in cold weather. I can understand limiting lodge capacity. Maybe they are scared of too many people trying to use bathrooms or something in the lodge, but I think if you communicate clearly in advance that lodge spacing will be limited, you don't need to start withholding day passes.

Everyone seems to be pretty pessimistic or at least quite cautious. That means it will probably be a blockbuster, lol. Not surprising though, recency bias is a huge factor in expectations. When we were churning out big snowstorms like sneakers at a Nike sweatshop, everyone always expected the next winter to be huge. Everyone also expected that we'd keep seeing the big -AO/NAO patterns we saw 2007-2013 too. Even blaming climate change on it (recall the "low sea ice = -AO" studies that were coming out?)...now that we have been dealing with a relentless +AO recently, the narrative and expectations have flipped.

Snow weenies in Nagano just threw their computers out the window.

Me too....but not if someone is offering '11-'12 as the alternative.

Ugh....I'll take last year over '11-'12 any day. At least I had snow pack for 27 days in December last year. Jan/Feb was worse than 2012, but I can't ignore the monstrous December difference. I guess if you largely missed the early Dec storm, then I could see how '11-'12 would be preferred.

GFS performs pretty well in fast flow....I remember even in the winter of 2012-2013....January 2013 was screaming fast flow and we kept getting little clipeprs and no big storms, and a huge meltdown and canceled winter posts came pouring in, and then when the Euro showed the Feb 2013 bomb, nobody believed it, but the flow was starting to slow and it nailed it and the GFS was back to being an embarrassment in big storms. This is fast flow, so yeah, toss the Euro far west solutions.

Steadily trending east

Hopefully that's what happens in the winter. I'm a worrier....but it sounds good based on what you say. My worry is that we see this surge early on, but it's a sh*t show with limits, prioitizing pass holders, etc..... and then you have some states still trying to tell people to quarantine....and then word spreads that it's not worth the trip and we see a big dropoff. Esp if the snow kind of sucks.

I'm pretty worried about the day skier volume for the mid-sized and smaller resorts. The big dogs owned by conglomerates will probably be fine, but if day pass sales are wayyyy down this winter, that could finish off some smaller places. I'm going to purposefully try and get to a few this winter for that reason.

Yeah the ncep version looked pretty solid most of the winter. Euro was hideous after a decent December.

It doesn't look very realistic either....esp the ECMWF. It basically has almost no negative 5H anomalies. Scott and I have been wondering this for years....if that is why these models have trouble spitting out spatially representative anomalies. (i.e., we talked about years like 2014 and 2015 where they just refused to spit out downstream cold anomalies despite an EPO ridge from hell over AK/Yukon).

That's pretty hideous....lets hope NCEP is right as that would probably be pretty solid for New England.

Yeah if you have a suppressed Aleutian ridge, then it risks a pig in AK. We narrowly avoided it in 2007-2008, but did not in 2011-2012. '08-'09, and '10-'11 had very poleward Aleutian ridges....so did 2017-2018. 2016-2017 was moderately poleward.

I wish they had H5 instead of SLP, but that is def a -NAO for December....they all have an Aleutian ridge too which is not a surprise in a rapidly strengthening La Nina.

The study I did was based on the Hurrell SLP method (not CPC) and I used DJFM composite. Both methods have their flaws. As for including March in the winter NAO calc, you can make a case either way....but I included it at the time since it's a massive part of our snowfall climo. I know I don't have to tell you how many times a big blocking episode in March produced some whopper months.

2006 was one of the years where the excessive -NAO in October didn't foreshadow a -NAO winter. There's some others too because the "strong October -NAO = winter -NAO" correlation is somewhat weak. It's notable though because it reverses the overall inverse correlation we normally see. I think off the top of my head, some years that had strongly -NAO Octobers that also produced -NAO winters are 1946-1947, 1968-1969, 2002-2003, 2004-2005, 2009-2010 and since the last time I ran the numbers, I think 2012-2013 also may have had an excessively strong October -NAO that foreshadowed winter blocking.

I remember doing a little study on this back on EasternUSwx and found that extremely negative NAOs in October actually tended to favor a -NAO winter. It wasn't a high correlation at all, but it reversed the classic negative correlation. This was only through like 2009 though...not sure what the last decade had produced.

‘07-‘08 was also warm and wet. Not a blowtorch...was around +1ish for the winter.

I don’t think < -2C for a trimonthly is all that realistic. Maybe -1.7ish could happen.

Yeah that’s a decent chance for NNE to get first accumulation on that look. We’ll see if it holds over the next few days. Even if it’s not totally synoptic ala 12z Euro, cold ULL snow showers are a distinct possibility.

Yeah a little tough when you got Madison/Adams towering in your backyard, LOL.