ORH_wxman

Subsurface is really cold under about 130W, so it wouldn't surprised me if Nina 3 cools a lot over the next 4 weeks or so.

Wasn't the storm like 126-132 hours out yesterday? Why would anyone expect it to stay on the models consistently at that range?

Should be interesting to see if this Nina gets a final surge into solid moderate over the next 2 weeks as there is a pretty big easterly burst forecasted in the trades. We actually have not had a Nina well into moderate territory (or stronger) since 2010-2011. This one would be a bit of a late bloomer like '07-'08 whereas '10-'11 was already rocking by mid/late summer.

Feb is often pretty mild in Ninas. Sometimes we get away with it though.

Yeah sometimes people even think warm ground might be a problem for accumulating snow at 1100 feet with temps in the 20s.

I had snow from that as well in 2008. Got a coating on the mulch that evening after it changed over. Wasn’t measurable though.

I had a thread on the old EasternUsWx forum titled "The October Snowfall Myth" and it went through the statistics of it. The biggest reason that myth gets perpetuated is because BOS (and HFD/BDL is similar too) has like a sample size of 4 Octobers in the last 50 years with measurable snow and they mostly sucked (2009, 2005, and 2011). You could include 1979 in there even though BOS got a trace, but much of the city had measurable. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of statistics would tell you a sample size of 3 or 4 is worthless in this context. But when we expand the sample to interior sites like ORH where we have double digit October snowfalls, the mean snowfall following years with measurable October snow increases to right around the long term mean of all years. (I.E., it has no correlation) Blockbuster years that had measurable October snowfall at ORH include 2002-2003, 2000-2001, 1960-1961, and 1961-1962.

We're in the post-mortem "let me spin my narrative from before the storm" phase of the event....I gotta give Kevin props to this part because he's skilled at it being the crafty salesman he is. It starts several days before the events where he's questioning whether people will get much of anything at all with everything to the west "just like previous events", and then he massages the expectations to the point where widespread 0.50-1.25" across SNE is a massive bust.

They got another 0.04 last hour so officially they are at 0.46”

Yeah they can be ok near the coastline sometimes, but the interior values are hilarious...how many times have we seen hurricane force gusts over the interior on those products? I think it was the April windstorm, the Euro had like 90mph gusts over a chunk of the interior.

Rain can be weird...I'd get a stratus gauge to supplement the PWS gauge. At least in winter, you won't have to worry since snow is much easier to verify.

Yeah seriously. There’s basically no analog for last year. Closest is maybe 1996-1997 but the late November and December pattern last year was even better than ‘96 and the post-Xmas pattern was even shittier than ‘97. Really bizarre. The big -AO bout in November too is usually very highly correlated with another sustained -AO stretch in the winter but it didn’t happen.

Yeah the thing is, I can point to epic winters that had one up there in October. What do we say about it those times? It just isn’t very useful as a predictive measure imho. I’ll definitely be on the nervous train of it shows up in a sustained fashion deep in November. That’s where it actually seems to matter.

I remember running our true garbage dumpster fire winters one time and large majority of them had pigs in November for an extended stretch. Last year was actually an exception.

There’s basically no correlation. So some years are going to be good after an October piggy (see 2010 or 1995) and other years are going to stink. As for last year, we didn’t actually have a pig in AK in October. Maybe briefly but the mean was a ridge that month. I’d worry if it shows up in November...esp 2nd half of the month.

Not worried about piggies in October....we do start to worry in November. Esp the 2nd half of November.

This was another one that is in my top 5 or 10 that you throw your computer out the window on

It was almost certainly the 1/13/93 storm then. Pretty classic latitude storm setup. http://mp1.met.psu.edu/~fxg1/NARR/1993/us0113.php#picture

I still have that thing though I only use it as a backup now. Field and stream jacket that was given to me in fall 1996 when I was in high school. I gotta find those pics again. Lol. I’m actually wearing that jacket in pics I’ve posted on here of April ‘97 when I’m also wearing the early 90s patriots hat with the PomPom on top of it.

We share a lot of our favorite storms but this one is definitely polar opposites. That storm is my greatest weather memory and it would take something incredibly special to surpass it.

Was the second one the 3/24/93 event? There were other events that winter with a gradient but that one was really sharp. Very little fell south of about a Weymouth to Franklin line...it was a surprise event with marginal midlevels. Logan had like 8” and suburbs had 10”. Couldve been the 1/13/93 event too. That one had a very similar gradient. Really hit the pike region and northward good but not very much south. Lot of ZR over interior south of pike though.

This will magically undergo a metamorphosis and become “widespread 1-2 feet, and then Friday and Monday are 6-10 river-eastward” during winter.

We need to go back and find it...you were cussing out that 1/24 storm. You could feel the anger through the screen reading it.

No, MLK melt was 2010. It was a 2-parter. Round 1 was the bigger of the two parts. It was forecasted to be very marginal but the line literally set up along the MA/CT border. Even though you knew it was snowing up in ORH, you didn’t really melt down until the next day and the day after.... The next day after part 1, Megan posted pics of us hiking in the woods near us with fir trees draped in like 8” of paste and you absolutely lost it. Then the next day part 2 came through and you were expecting this one to probably be snow in Tolland and I actually was too...but then you reported that it was 33F and raining and wondering if it would flip to snow. As the hours passed, and it didn’t flip down there, I posted some pics of huge nickel/quarter sized flakes absolutely ripping in ORH with everything draped in another 3-4” or so and you went nuclear. Just a monster tantrum. It may have rivaled Scooter’s January 2015 tantrum right before the epic pattern crushed us. We’ll be telling our grandchildren about it.

The first few early season events are a novelty to track for a lot of the region regardless of IMBY effects, but we usually start ignoring posters like Powderfreak on the 3rd or 4th upslope event that affects a 10 square mile area. If it’s a bad winter in SNE, then posters like CoastalWx start becoming downright hostile.