ORH_wxman

Yeah I think we'd be happy with anything at this point....nevermind the Euro solution of threatening to break November snowfall records that were set back in the November 26-27, 1898 storm.

D8-9 EPS is definitely favorable on the synoptics....this isn't a deep full-wavelength event, but it's pretty classic for an early season redeveloper....note the relatively shallow shortwave over the center of the country and you have west-based -NAO weakness and a strong 50/50 sig. You'll need all of those this early in the season to hold the high in place otherwise you just won't be able to overcome the antecedent warmth offshore this early. What we don't have a stout western ridge, which is why this probably would come in at a bit of a shallow angle....so you'll need that confluence. But at least the synoptics are there. We'll see if it still holds in another few days.

The system is long occluded by the time that ULL moves south of us so it's gonna be favoring different areas on almost every run. I don't think there's much accumulation potential but the higher terrain near you and even down through ORH and NE CT could see a coating if they get into a heavier burst or two. But right now, it's mostly "first flakes" novelty potential here. Without an arctic airmass, it's pretty marginal....esp lower elevations. Type of thing where it;s 38F and then maybe it drops to 35F or 34F in a heavier burst with wet flakes. Seems like we get into a more true semi-arctic airmass by later next week which is why there could be a shot at something next weekend if the cards fall right.

When was the last time we saw a high in eastern Ontario/western Quebec when a system approaches us from the southwest?

Congrats @scooter on the GFS for 11/29-30

@powderfreak, looks like a decent upslope event potential this weekend. Cold airmass too coming in for Tday and beyond as well. Good news for the World Cup at Killington.

Gotta watch for some unstable soundings on late Friday night and into early Saturday. GFS actually has some nice bursts of heavy wet snow even into lower elevations of SNE. But these are the types of things you won't really be able to get a good handle on until much closer. But when it's really cold aloft and you have 8C/km ML lapse rate in a saturated sounding, doesn't take much to get a few bursts.

Yep...to totally bust the drought, we'll need a very juicy winter. Finger's crossed we get it and most of it is frozen.

Yes we will need a lot more to fill the reservoirs and lakes back up a bit, but the fire danger will be massively reduced after this event.

I'm 99% sure the first Clark's meeting was Dec 2013 right before Christmas....I think it was the 23rd.

Dec 2017 was pretty good up here as well. Really 2017, 2019, and 2020 were all solid Decembers. With the exception of 12/17/20 though, they all sucked in SE MA to be fair to Brett. But we’ve had 3 garbage Decembers in a row now so hopefully this one can break the streak.

EPO and especially WPO are looking a lot better than recent years. We’ll see if that can maintain. @Typhoon Tip and I mentioned it a few times already and we talked about it last winter too. WPO has been kind of a turd in the punchbowl recently (it has even muted some of the recent -EPO bursts) and there’s a pretty strong signal it will be more favorable to start this cold season. That doesn’t guarantee us great results but it does mean we won’t underperform the cold dumps into Canada so when things do try to move SE, they are coming from a potent source region. It’s loading the dice a bit better for us than previously.

Forgetting about next week’s system for a minute, the EPS continue to trend too toward a colder start to December (and very end of November) This is actually looking a lot colder from a hemispheric pattern perspective than even a few runs ago. We’ll see how it looks as we get closer but this would likely be an interesting pattern to follow in early December if it maintains.

Sell the clown maps hard on this type of setup. Mountains in VT/NH would do ok but lower down would struggled unless you really crank omega and this far out that’s gonna be iffy…esp with somewhat weak thermal gradients. You worry about disorganization in precip field. Plus, still a chance the whole thing ends up further north. I still think there’s a good chance for some flurries and snow showers around the ULL on the weekend though. Many have a good shot at first flakes.

Interesting that the GEFS keep trending towards this -WPO/+EPO/-NAO look to end November and start December. The +EPO sounds bad but it’s not because of the -WPO is still able to supply arctic cross-polar insert into the PJ…this is something @Typhoon Tip and I were discussing some last year…how even when we got brief bursts of favorable EPO, a staunchly positive WPO was really being a turd in the punchbowl helping so many colder patterns underperform. This time, it could help if the ensembles keep trending that way. That pattern would be fairly interesting around here I think to start December.

Even if it tracks a touch north of us it’s still a cyclonic flow with lots of clouds/snow showers/flurries. So yeah, unless it tracks way north, I’d still feel decent about many getting first flakes. I’m not talking accumulations. We’d need it tracking south of us to really talk about accumulating snow outside the upslope spots.

Decent chance of first flakes for many next weekend with that deep ULL moving overhead. Prob no accumulation but the novelty is always there on first flakes of the season. No true arctic cold in sight until you flip the EPO/WPO region (broken record the last 2-3 winters) but you’ll at least get some seasonably coldish weather for a few days when you have a ULL like that overhead.

The year is 1990. Bruce Schwoegler just issued a forecast for 3-6" of snow. You immediately flip to channel 7 to see if Harvey Leonard is on board. He's similar but slightly less....3-5 inches is his forecast. You can't believe your eyes. We might actually get enough snow to cover all the grass blades and even shovel? You quickly change the channel again to channel 5 to see if Dick Albert is matching the other 2. Instead, it's Mark Rosenthal who is filling in that night. He says you might wake up to it "snowing to beat the band" and is forecasting 4-7". You almost faint from happiness. We're back to the dark days of our childhood.

Ensembles are trying to cool things down Tday week. Nothing crazy but at least cold enough that you’d might get a threat if you lined up some synoptics. Euro weeklies from last week were still a furnace though right through the first 10 days of December, we’ll see if they change today.

BDL was prob around 15" in 2001-02.....really awful winter, but 3" is laughable. Even at BDL. The only places that have plausibly experienced a 3" seasonal total in New England are maybe some of the beaches down on the south coast of CT....esp really close to the NY line.

First flakes for some of the peaks today/tonight and possibly tomorrow. Upslope flow and midlevel temps cool to bring snow down into the highest terrain.

The empirical evidence would argue against a death spiral. We would’ve continued to get large declines and instead it’s basically been flat since the nadir 2010-2012 period. The evidence also argues against a rebuilding of multi-year ice to levels seen pre-2007. We seem to be more in a semi-stable period of sea ice the last decade-plus. I suspect we need to warm more in the winters in order to see more record lows consistently. (This is because winters are still cold enough to refreeze the first year ice into its max thickness of roughly 2m) Until that happens, we’d need a big time preconditioning weather pattern to get a new record.

Looks like 2.47 may have been the min. Up to 2.58 million sq km as the central CAB low-concentration ice is refreezing now.

Area is down to 2.47 million sq km....not sure how much further we can drop given the likely refreezing of the central CAB commencing where there's a lot of low concentration ice right now, but if we can drop below 2.42 million sqkm, then that would beat 2016 for second place.

Gonna need that Aleutian ridge to get poleward....if it can, then we get that nice -WPO to a neutral or negative EPO combo....and that will help give the arctic shots some bite to them so the airmasses aren't as stale. In recent winters, aside from the annoying deep western troughs, we've had a lot of +WPO which kind of gives us fake arctic airmasses even when the EPO goes a bit negative or the PNA goes positive. Obviously last year was an El Nino, but the La Nina of 2022-23 had this pattern....despite a -EPO and strong arctic ocean blocking, we had deep troughing over Kamchatka and far eastern Siberia which you don't want to see. You might be able to get away with that if you had a decent PNA, but once you add in the deep west coast trough, it was game over. I know @Typhoon Tip and I have had discussions about the stronger WPO/Bering sea ridges being a good cold signal (and the opposite being a very strong warm signal). I've often talked to @CoastalWxabout the Bering Sea death vortex too....low heights there really suck for us. In those colder La Nina years like '08-'09, '10-'11 and to a lesser extent '07-'08, we had the -WPO present with the big poleward Aleutian ridges....'07-'08 was kind of a hybrid, the meat of the Aleutian ridge was south but there were vestiges north of Bering and into the arctic ocean almost acting a block (esp in Dec 2007).