ORH_wxman

Just to put things in perspective....and this by no means guarantees we're going to drastically turn things around....but as BOS currently sits at 14.6 inches of snow for the winter....here's some past years: For BOS: Winter...........1/23 snow.....final snow 2016-2017........10.4............47.6 2014-2015.........5.5.............110.6 2012-2013.........7.6.............63.4 2002-2003.......12.1.............71.3 1996-1997.......13.8.............51.2 (hey sometimes it just takes one storm to make it worth it) 1992-1993........20.0............83.9 1971-1972.......15.5.............47.5 1968-1969.........5.7.............53.8 1966-1967........9.9..............60.1 1957-1958........5.4.............44.8 (but probably double that at Rt 128) 1955-1956.......11.8............60.9 Heck, even last year had what, 2 inches at this point in BOS? It didn't finish above normal, but there were several decent events and the March 4th blitz. The 2014-2015 turnaround is not believable unless you lived through it. 100 years from now weenies are going to be making fun of that season claiming how ridiculous it was that humans were measuring the snow and not perfectly calibrated robots....just like we make fun of those 1800s "snow up to thy knickers" totals now.

I do miss the days before clown maps. Focusing on the precip and midlevel temps/track made people think a little more about the model runs.

James got like 30"....there I just proved you all can have fun in the same storm.

How much did you get in Jan 2015 blizzard?

Yeah slightly above average....BOS averages say 20" mark should be hit Jan 23th.

It hadn't entirely melted...I think BOS had like a 3" snow depth and ORH was around 12" when the Feb '78 blizzard hit. The Cleveland superbomb on the 25th-26th had done a number on the pack for sure though. There were two warning criteria snowfalls before the Jan 20 incher too.....most areas had a snow depth around 30" before the Cleveland superbomb. Honestly, the CLE superbomb prob saved a great deal of extra snow removal pain. Those two warning events before the huge Jan snowstorm were messy sleet mixed in too...so there was a ton of water equivalent in the pack and snow banks. I've seen pics of ORH before the Feb '78 storm and it's huge snow banks already even with the CLE superbomb trimming them down some.

Putrid system...even interior SNE (at last N of pike/495) prob doesn't lose it either....it's like 35-38F rain. But I'd almost rather wipe it clean...it's the type where there will be ice and other slushy garbage all over the place afterward.

The old saying with persistence forecasting is that you will get a high percentage of your days correct, but when you bust, you bust spectacularly, so persistence scores are generally terrible because the magnitude of the busts are really high.

Yeah the pattern was never good in this past one....but I mean, we knew that it was hostile the whole time and knew it was an uphill climb....we needed the timing to work out and it just didn't. The shortwave rotating around the greenland vortex trended weaker/north. That really was probably most of the bad trend. So yeah...we can blame it on a hostile pattern in the sense that everything needed to go right, but the failure itself was the shortwave up north trending bad on us. The cynical amongst us would say if we needed that thing to trend north, you know damned well it wouldn't have budged or trended south and we would have blamed it on a monster vortex up there. It didn't help that we had a disgusting antecedent airmass (again, owing to the bad larger scale pattern).....if we had a fresh airmass in place, we'd probably survive that west trend on the ULL...it may have been a messier storm, but probably a hell of a thump on the front end anyway and prob a lot more CAD/resistance anyway....so it prob redevelops further east. Next week looks to have a little more wiggle room....but obviously everyone should trend carefully until we're much closer. At the very least, the antecedent airmass in the next one isn't total dogshit.

I dunno if I'd call that winter crap. BOS had a 21 inch storm in January 1978. Id say a more hopeful analog might be something like '68-'69 or '12-'13. Both went into February with really paltry snowfall totals in BOS and coastal areas but both seasons are remembered fondly...multiple blockbuster events occurred after that (Feb '13/Mar '13 and the Lindsay Storm and Feb 24-28, 1969)....both had the NAO going favorable though. Would be nice to see that happen this year too.

Some differences between EPS and GEFS in the LR but both are definitely better looking. EPS look better than GEFS though. Guess we'll see how things progress in the next 3-4 days. Next week's threat is supported by the Hudson Bay and Quebec ridging. Had a little bit of a western ridge too so perhaps this one can have a better fate than this weekend.

I think we also have to remember that even the best seasonal forecasters are prob busting pretty bad at least 30-40% of the time. There's a lot of innovative thought out there but it's still in the frontier of meteorology. I even remember as far back as 1994-1995....I remember hearing like 3 different mets on TV reference multiple seasonal forecasts that were honking for a big El Niño winter. Obviously it was the opposite...lol. Despite it being a weakish west based Niño. We all remember 2001-2002...how many cold forecasts were there that winter? I do think it's easy to get stuck in tunnel vision...we all do it. The mid/late 2010s has us obsessing over the PAC. But the NAO (even if transient) is what gave us our big December storm. Our lack of big NAO blocks since 2013 has definitely been notable so it makes the PAC seem more important and it's probably why we are obsessing over it...when we don't have the Atlantic help it is harder to cover up a shitty PAC. We had deep western troughs for a chunk of 2010-2011 but we shrugged it off because of prolific ATL blocking. Even in late December 2008 and early January 2009...garbage PAC but we covered it up because our one great ATL block happened during that time. In 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 we didn't care hat we had a +AO because the one small domain of the PAC that mattered most was obscenely favorable. We didn't care that there was a black hole over Baffin Island. But in the long run, black holes over Baffin Island come back to haunt us because we get killed when the PAC goes bad in that setup.

I'm actually just messing around. Lol. The trend on this thing has been ridiculous. I sympathize with the skiers so I don't actually wish for rains to Maine. I don't mind if ya'll smoke cirrus a few times but I hate seeing warm sectors shooting up to the Canadian border. Hopefully you all at least salvage a bit of base builder.

MJO is a lot more influential IMHO...or at least the convection in that area regardless of the "official" MJO phase. It's just kind of hard to predict so we can't really say in advance of when a standing wave there is going to promote a 2015 pattern for 3 weeks.

Yeah normally you don't need to worry about those little nuances. They rarely matter but on a verbatim solution like that they might. But don't worry, it won't matter in another couple cycles. They had dendrite-raised fried chicken for lunch and now they are coming to Stowe to go pond skimming next. We're gonna get this ULL north of Lake Ontario.

Not sure what you mean by "limited" but there's enough cold in SNE on the mean. Its a weakish signal and 9 day out so yeah, I wouldn't get hopes up.

Well he's in NYC. The EPS definitely gives SNE a chance but take it fwiw this far out.

We're gonna get sucked back in on the next threat. Already looking a lot more wintry on the EPS.

In fairness, the pattern is not the same as that SE ridge with 588 heights up into Atlanta...this was a very low gradient pattern with spring bowling ball potential. 576 line camping out down in south Florida. So I think there was some reason to believe it could easily bowl its way across the TN valley and off the coast of NJ. That was obviously negated by the confluence to the north weakening significantly in the past 36 hours allowing this to just pinwheel up into Ohio and now upstate NY. The lessening confluence seemed to go against the seasonal trend ironically...we had a lot of events where confluence seemed to strengthen as we got closer. Probably this mostly boils down to that it's hard for models to predict storms at 5-6 days out. Lot of moving parts and we didn't have much margin for error in this torchy El Niño look this week.

The pivotal map actually has a little weenie region of 850 temps below zero in the mahoosucs and whites. The wsi maps don't have that and have the like more up toward Rangeley and Sugarloaf. Wouldnt exactly give me the kushies though even if I was at Sunday river. But verbatim I can see why pivotal is showing paste.

Agreed. Esp in that type of setup. Not that is really matters anyway. What's going to stop this ULL from tracking into Toronto? Someone convince me it won't with a good argument. That confluence shortwave has trended weaker almost contuiously every run for the past 30 hours.

The pivotal maps look more weenieish than the basic slp/850 maps I posted. They seem to be supporting a lot of snow south of the 0C 850 line at 90 hours. Thats prob why there was some slight difference in opinion. Sounding must be close to isothermal for that to happen.

Here's 84

Maybe NW Maine? some areas try to flip on the backside but this is pretty ugly...maybe a few inches on the front end for Sunday river to Whites?

Yeah if it waited 150 miles to dive down t would have worked too...I'm just saying on previous runs, the ULL dove down in the same spot but it's where t tracked from thee that changed. 00z and 06z runs 30-36 hours ago had the ULL diving down into southern Missouri almost exactly where today's 12z run is...the problem is those runs then tracked it ENE across KY, WV, and eventually near philly and south of SNE. Today's run brings the low north-northeast through Southern Illinois and then Indiana and NW Ohio and into upstate NY. We lost the pseudo blocking mechanism that forced a more eastward track. A lot of that was probably due to the pressing arctic shortwave rounding the vortex near Greenland coming in weaker. There may have been some other nuances in Canada further west too.