ORH_wxman

It would be mostly snow just off the coast in E MA (prob near 128) and SW CT would do well but that is a classic setup for rain from SE CT to S RI and most of SE MA. Gonna change about 15 more times so totally useless anyway.

That’s mostly liquid in the coast. Not that it matters but just sayin.

Not really. As long as people know what it means. The term is relative...Storms like 1/12/11 would’ve hit us like 10 different ways....maybe for places like the cape it was more precarious but that block was forcing that sucker underneath us with varying intensities and orientation of the shortwave. Other storms are literally like an unmanned firehose and you see a lot more variation and sensitivity to the model initialization. That’s really the key...how sensitive is the solution to small changes in the initial conditions?

Well they had close to 2 feet on central/eastern Long Island IIRC. How far is that from northeast NJ?

Yeah it was the western outlier but still only about a 30-40 mile miss? It just happened to occur over probably the most densely populated 400 square mile area in the country that receives winter wx so it seemed a lot worse than it was from an empirical standpoint.

That was a good storm to illustrate where going with the outlier is very risky. I remember NWS OKX was buying the euro. Ill be interested to see what I said in the thread that ginxy linked but I remember being somewhat skeptical of the euro by the time we were inside 36 hours. RGEM actually really did well on that storm IIRC. Showed the real strong deformation/fronto band from 495 to ORH to Eastern CT where is exactly where it ended up. It had a good winter overall.

No. March 2018

Yeah I wouldn’t hate that...maybe run the ensembles out to d15 once per day or something though. Just to get a feel for longer range trends. But OP runs really aren’t that useful beyond D4....I could buy maybe running them out to d5-6 but not beyond that. There’s no really use for an OP run at 168 hours or 204 hours. IIRC...It used to be something like 72-84 hours when the OP models started outperforming the ensembles on the WPF parameter but I’m not sure these days.

Yep. I’m not even really paying that close attention to it at day 8. I might start looking more at day 6 but even that is not very accurate. Even though forecasts have improved in the past 10 years, we’re not at the point where day 6 is all of the sudden what day 3-4 were in 2009 or 2010. Clown maps and easily accessible model runs 4 times per day has warped the weenie mind....they’ve confused quantity of information with accuracy.

The EPS have significantly improved overnight IMHO in the 11-15. They have been showing some signs but last night’s run took it up a notch with the ridging out in the PAC domain. Lets see if we can build on this and track it closer unlike the last one which vaporized about 9 days out.

I’m on that bandwagon right now. Getting better but still plenty of problems for sustained deep winter through D10-12...then maybe 2nd week of February is when we see it become a little more entrenched....but we’ve been faked out before already this year so we’ll see how this one does. Btw, this says nothing of the storm next week...that’s all about timing with 3 different shortwaves. It could end up anywhere. Hopefully we catch a break and it’s a snowier solution. At least we’ll have something closer to a seasonable airmass ahead of it....as it looks right now.

We don't need a Kocin cookbook pattern for a good storm in New England....it makes it more likely for a big one, but we get the majority of our warning criteria events as something well-timed in a flawed pattern.

It is better. I didn’t say it was great though. Lol. We have a better antecedent airmass...not a high bar to clear compared to tomorrow. There’s some western ridging. Maybe some Hudson Bay ridging too. But the airmass isn’t exceptional and the isn’t a great 50/50 type low so this would favor the interior all else equal.

Yeah you are burnt toast on an EPS mean type track....New England would prob do ok...esp interior. But it's mostly meaningless right now. The pattern isn't very good for the coast though...esp further south. Need something to change either out west or in the NAO....or just get really lucky with a needle-threader.

Pretty huggy solution if you ask me....but it's 200 hour out, so I'm not really parsing this that closely right now

I'm not sure I ever got excited for a 204 hour prog....we used to not even really look past D6-7....though maybe we'd peak just for fun at the clown range.

Ha....I was a bit skeptical it would actually track that far north....but I didn't think there was anything stopping the north trend.It was almost solely based on the confluence to the north. Here's a comparison.....check out the heights north of Maine on the Euro 4 days compared to now.....:

Yeah both of those were the "winners"....though even their ULL tracks were too far south at that time...something like over SNE and into Maine via WV and PA....this thing is actually tracking over Detroit and Toronto.

By the time the NAM could see it, the other globals had already trended pretty far north....so I don't think the NAM was exceptional at this timeframe compared to the others.

All guidance was absolutely awful....but yeah, the Euro was probably the worst since it was the furthest south.

Both sides are crappy for the foreseeable futures, though the PAC is a little less crappy in the medium range....we get a PNA ridge while the EPO stays kind of meh but better than it has been. Here's what it looks like in that D11-12 time range

We were only half-joking about the ULL going through Ottawa?

Yeah you have to be very careful about where on the ice you are. There was a pretty large pond/lake near me growing up that always had a bit of a cove section that would be iced over really early and had no running water near it....that part would be safe for skating even in the garbage winters....other parts of the lake you definitely could not be on unless it had been frigid for at least a week to 10 days....so in those bad winters, you may never be safe out there. There was also some areas that had little streams and such flowing into them and those parts were also less safe. Local knowledge makes a difference for sure.

Yeah....the things you want to look for are evidence on guidance that the PV is actually taking hits. Scott posted some good 50mb Euro maps (which unfortunately aren't widely available) that showed the PV getting very elongated and stretched out....that is a bullish signal that it's taking big hits and could split....or displace. Either one is bullish for blocking. We don't really see it though until later in the ensemble run though....like after D11-12. But if it's actually true, then we'd expect to see the arctic pattern become a lot more favorable by the 2nd week of February or so. This site has 12z Euro OP runs out to D10....not overly useful for stuff beyond 7-8 days, but if it looks like the event is getting closer, then these will become useful: https://www.geo.fu-berlin.de/en/met/ag/strat/produkte/winterdiagnostics/index.html You can check out some of the GFS/GEFS products here....but they aren't great IMHO https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/SSW/

Wolves do love red meat though....so hard to blame him.