ORH_wxman

Someone probably in N RI/NE CT or interior E MA south of the pike had all 4 months AN for snow....you had to be far enough northwest to get smoked in January 2003 but also far enough south to get hit by that nice band in the 3/6/03 system.

March didn't make it for ORH....it may have for some other area that also did well in Nov 2002.

The bolded is really obvious when you visit there if you are at all informed about geology and meteorology together....it's pretty amazing seeing all these structures, but also seemingly very fragile as you put it...or "exposed fragility" to be more precise. I remember reading a paper, say, 14-15 years ago on the climate of CA going back centuries and the unmistakable conclusion from it was that the 20th century was the wettest century on record there since at least maybe 1000-1100...pre-Little Ice Age. I was thinking, "wow, and people go all crazy over droughts like '76-77.....that will look like Shangri La when one of these 10 or 20 year droughts hits"...at the time, we hadn't had the 2014-2015 drought yet there, but same sentiment....the rhetoric was desperate-sounding, but in a historical climate context, the 2014-2015 drought is a fly compared to so many previous periods. The inevitability of a life-changing drought there rang true when reading that paper...and that's not even accounting for any enhancement climate warming might impose on top of such a drought. And I didn't even talk about the geological inevitability there, but you hinted at it.... I'd pass.

High desert is amazing....I'd consider living anywhere there or in the mountains near there in NM, AZ, S CO/S UT....basically the four corners states outside of places like S AZ and Albuquerque or Las Cruces. As for CA, I had a lot of family out there over the years living in different parts of the state.........I love the Tahoe region of CA and some of far N CA like Mt Shasta and up near Oregon (it's very secluded up there, you might as well be in Idaho), but otherwise I don't have much desire to be in that state. The Mojave desert is pretty cool to visit, but I definitely wouldn't live there. The rest of SoCal is basically a dump to me...San Diego was pretty fun visiting years ago but it's become a lot more crowded in the past couple decades. Still not as bad as the LA Basin.

Looking for other seasons in more detail and not off the top of my head...... '76-'77 narrowly missed at ORH...Feb '77 was slightly below normal for snowfall but all other months were above. It appears that '95-'96 is indeed the only other season outside of '04-'05....and actually '04-'05 didn't qualify at ORH (it did for BOS though)....December '04 was about 1.5" below normal for snow. '02-'03 came close but March fizzled badly after the first week that gave a 5-6" event. '77-'78 also very narrowly came close but November only mustered 2.2" vs a 3.0" average.

Yeah it's hard to pull off AN snow in every month including November....1995-1996 did it too. Off the top of my head I can't think of any others.....'93-'94 came close, but we only got a few tenths in November.

'04-'05 and last year took totally different paths too after December...last winter, December was extremely wet with near normal temps and then a blowtorch/dry rest of the winter....while '04-'05 was consistently pretty wet and not warm the whole winter.

Well he is on the Cape.....the place where there is actually a positive correlation.

Only issue i have with this is ENSO to precip correlation is basically zero over New England. Exception might be a weak positive correlation over far SE MA and south coast.

You might be thinking of 3/3/94. Massive interior storm. We got about 13-14” in ORH with big wind. Lot of rain for the big cities after some front end snow....though I believe BOS had decent snow (8”+) with some rain/sleet at the height. But the true jackpot was back into interior PA and central NY where 2 feet fell.

Mar '56 to your generation was what Dec '92 was to mine (or maybe Mar '93 for those who got shafted in '92)...."The Big one that broke the snow drought" for each generation of kid snow weenies.

The Syzygy storm was 1/2/87

It was mostly the early 1950s....at least over SNE....1955-1956 seemed to break the bad stretch.

Very cold winter in New England as well but SNE missed the Feb 79 storm...whiffed to the south. They had some rainers in January where NNE got snow/sleet so the winter was largely a bust here.

1930s were pretty terrible here too though there were a couple blockbusters mixed in (like ‘33-‘34). Some of our warmest winter months are in the 1930s. The early 1950s were horrific too.

You can include the first 3 winters of the 1990s in the bad period of the 1980s....and also 1978-1979/1979-1980. 78-79 was probably decent in NNE but it was utter trash in SNE. Rain/cold/whiff/rain/cold pattern. For ORH, there were 3 above average winters (1981-1982, 1983-1984, and 1986-1987) for snowfall and two near-average winters (1987-1988 and 1982-1983) in the 14 year period. But the clunkers were pretty bad. The freeze/thaw cycles were e bad in 1984-1985 and 1985-1986. Add onto that 4 consecutive garbage winters from 1988-89 through 1991-92 (you could argue 1989-90 wasn’t THAT bad), it’s not a fond set of memories.

Not just now but it was rocking us in the October and November forecasts. It busted spectacularly. LR models aren’t very accurate...even the best ones. Just another example.

I went skiing up at Sunday River on March 21-23, 2014 and when we arrived at the old Evergreen Valley Inn (I made previous posts about this interesting relic) where we were staying that trip, there was about 42-45” on the ground. It was up to my hips/waist so I knew it was easily over 3 feet closing in on 4’. They had just gotten croaked by a 12-15” paster the day before so it looked even “deeper” than the actual depth as it often does with freshly fallen wetter snow. Very impressive. We got another 2” on the 22nd while there and then it just got frigid....that March was exceptional for the persistence of the cold.

We’ve had some very potent individual cold snaps in very recent winters despite the winters themselves not being that cold. Feb 2016 saw the coldest temps at BOS and ORH since January 1957...then the January 2019 cold snap saw the coldest high temp at ORH since 1994 (high of 1F)

Yeah we haven’t had a lot of that since the 2013-2014 to 2014-2015 winters....been a lot more zonal patterns since then, although 2017-2018 was pretty meridional at times...esp when we got that obscene late December arctic outbreak where we spent the better part of a week below 10F...though even that one wasn’t as deeply penetrating as some of those classic ones like from, say, early Feb 96 (circa weather channel reporting Tower MN got to -60F) or even back to back Dec 2009 and 2010 when we had deeply frozen orange crops into central FL.

Yeah over there it was an all timer for both snow and cold...some of the folks to your west had their coldest winter on record. Even Duluth MN which had records go back to the 1860s missed their coldest on record by like 0.2F or something ridiculous...the old record being like 1873-1874 or something like that I recall.

Looks more like a 2013-2014 pattern with the big -EPO/+PNA and raging +NAO. Not that there’s anything wrong with that really...very good winter.

I was thinking this....

Update as we get close to the minimums.... Current NSIDC area is 2.74 million sq km and current extent is 3.94 million sq km. These should decline a bit further to the min (prob sometime in a week to 10 days historically....perhaps slightly sooner for area). Pretty happy with the predictions so far....we'll see if there are any late season surprises.

We pay even more than that for 2 boys (4 years old and 1 year old)....it's ridiculous how expensive a high-quality daycare is. But our kids just started going back to daycare after a 6 month hiatus, so at least we saved up money, lol.