ORH_wxman

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.

A Randolph Ripper is what I will use in winter for snow events.

Yeah that was a fun one to draw up. I always say that I need to resume doing those but it’s hard these days with kids, lol. One of these years I definitely will though...unless some other entity beats me to the punch with detail and QC equal to or superior to what I set as my minimum standards. Anyways, here’s the 2007-2008 map again:

Maybe because Europeans don't care about TCs.

That was its "Brady Anderson 1996" season....randomly keeps hitting them out of the park that year and then regresses back to usual after that.

Yes it is....almost no decent Ninas had garbage Decembers. You usually want at least an average December. I'll be ORH-centric since it's easy for me to remember the years.....but garbage Nina Decembers for ORH are: 2011, 1999, 1998, 1988, 1984, 1973, 1955, 1954 I defined garbage as any December that was in the 30th percentile for snowfall or worse. So in this case for ORH, it would be like 7 inches of snow or worse in December. Of the list of years above, only 1955-1956 was good. All others were pretty horrific including the least snowiest season on record in 1954-1955. One other year in 1971 was a little bit outside the threshold at 9.6 inches in December. That Nina ended up being a blockbuster. Though just a few days before December started, the huge Thanksgiving 1971 storm hit, so there's another reason to be skeptical of thinking that year was going to bust. All those years I listed above also had garbage Novembers except 1955 (also the one year that didn't have a garbage winter out of that set....wonder if we should combine the two months when looking at Ninas?)

Common denominator of '95-'96, '05-'06, and '07-'08 were all 3 had very good or excellent Decembers. The pattern differed though in how we achieved it....1995 was a big -NAO block and 2007 was literally the opposite...a monster +NAO vortex that actually was displaced far enough southwest that it was acting almost like a block in and of itself and producing a big gradient in the east where it was a massive torch in the mid-atlantic/southeast and pretty cold in New England. 2005 was mostly PAC-driven western ridging, though the NAO wasn't hostile.

It did...seems like it's going to be operational now on other sites I guess. But it's still the RGEM at 60-84 hours, lol

Nice clipper redeveloper Miller B for 10/5 on the GFS....another 8 weeks later....

Still waiting for the epic pattern that the Euro seasonal had last winter.

Yeah I’m not a total expert on this stuff but from all the stuff I’ve read over the years, you want lots of cold (but not freezing) nights and sunny days. That was happening up until recently when the freezes happened...so perhaps there was enough sugar production to still get lots of reds/oranges from those previous “cold but not freezing” nights and the actual freeze is just going to act to shorten the season rather than have a large effect on dulling the colors.

Yeah maybe the freeze wasn’t bad enough to dull them much. I don’t know. Or maybe it would have been even brighter without the freeze. Hard to say. There’s obviously other factors too. We had a lot of cold crisp “near freeze” nights up north prior to the actual freeze, so perhaps that was enough to really juice the sugars in the hardwoods.

Early hard freezes tend to do both. Dulls the color some and shortens the season. That prob wouldn’t affect powderfreak’s mid-slope pics because they didn’t freeze I don’t think. They would actually get enhanced color because “near-freeze” nights and sunny days bring out more oranges and reds. But lower down it might be more noticeable. Doesn’t mean it cancels the foliage season...just makes it less and shorter than it otherwise would have been.

We’re definitely getting color on the leaves earlier than my previous 3 years here at this house.

I've usually used a longer term average (they have an option for 1951-2010) to compare the years. That idea might need to be reassessed though as we continue to warm....once you warm enough, a solidly below average winter based on 2001-2030 normals might not be below average at all in 1950. Right now, the seasonal variance is still significantly more than the underlying warming trend, but it becomes ever closer as the years go by.

Yeah I wasn’t making a moral stance on it...death sucks no matter what...just throwing out an empirical way of measuring it. If you all of the sudden had, say, 70k less deaths than usual over the next 2 years after a theoretical vaccine next year, then you would be able to more accurately figure out how many were killed who weren’t likely to die very soon. You just subtract that number from the overall death toll. If the virus did not “pull forward” a ton of short terms deaths, and most were medium term on the order of a decade, then you would not see the excess deaths lower much at all.

I think a real measure will be if when this virus passes us, do we see a lower number of excess deaths. That would imply we sped up a bunch of deaths that might have occurred in the next, say, 2-3 years. I’ve seen that theory thrown around too. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to do that unless we have a widespread vaccine.

Yeah let’s keep the politicians out of this thread. We’ve already went down that rabbit hole too far months ago.