ORH_wxman

It won't happen....even the borderline realistic worst-case warming scenarios have around 5C of warming over the next couple hundred years....a place like AUG is about 12-13F (7C) colder than EWR/NYC in the winter. There's some crazy predictions of like 6-10C on the higher end of RCP 8.5 scenarios out to 2200-2300, but none of those actually pass the smell test....mostly because RCP 8.5 itself is almost impossible to achieve based on their assumptions of energy use over the next several decades.

Unrealistic expectations often affect the “grading” imho. Also, I feel like we tend to overlook the bad periods the further out we are from that year...I’ve often caught myself waxing nostalgic about some winters that were good, but probably not objectively any better than a more recent winter that I tend to point out the down periods. It also doesn’t help that there is strong variability in climate over short distances. Much of ORH county for example can expect to see 75-85 days of snow cover per winter while you might get only half that really close to the coast less than 40 miles away...and even less than half right along the coast south of BOS and much of far SE MA. With all of us sharing obs, many might feel unjustly screwed out of their share of winter when it’s actually not that uncommon to see multiple right gradient systems.

Weak Niña/Cold Neutral....just go with 2013-2014 there...

We had one excellent NAO block that entire winter but it was perfectly timed to coincide with a one-eyed pig that developed for the first week to 10 days of Jan 2009.....normally we would have furnaced but we hung tough and even snuck in a couple snow/ice SWFEs before the PAC flipped because the NAO block was holding the confluence in SE Canada....the NAO block broke down right as the PAC flipped back to AK ridging, but that was fine....we had excellent cold delivery and it set the stage for the bitter cold mid-month and the 1-2 punch MLK weekend.

Yeah, in our last weak Nina, we had that great stretch for most of December and into early January....too bad it didn't go a little longer before the torch after 1/10. At least it had the epic rebound in March though....not all Ninas come back like that in March. 2001 did too. Both had epic NAO blocks. Jan '09 was kind of a sneaky great month too in a Nina....zero torches the whole month with deep snow pack and a lot of events. I think ORH never broke 40F that month. Only a handful of months off the top of my head can say that (Jan '03, Feb '15, Jan '77, Feb '78 maybe)

At least weak La Nina is pretty good usually....and hopefully that means we don't have to wait long either. Usually pretty active Decembers.

'18-'19 was below normal over interior SNE....ORH only finished with 51.4". Time to get back on the horse. Last time ORH finished with 3 consecutive below normal seasons was 1997-1998 through 1999-2000.

Yeah right now I’d lean weak La Niña....it’s possible though we stay cold-neutral.

Seems like a lot of early pessimism for winter prospects going around this summer. That usually makes me feel better about things.

Yeah it was cool going from clear skies with the moon visible about 10-20 miles out and then it got cloudy and a few flurries by the time I was at downtown Troy. Still, there wasn’t that much snow OTG...but once I start climbing the final slope toward the base, it just increased exponentially and it’s like I went into a snow globe with 2 feet OTG. It wasn’t heavy when I got there but a consistent 1 mile vis light snow with good dendrites stacking up....but at some point overnight it turned into a wind whipped upslope blizzard and woke up to an absolute white out. When I left the upslope storm wasn’t even done yet, but I was out of it just as quickly going home. Troy had more snow but it seemed like they “only” picked up about 5-6” additional from when I passed through there on the way up. Meanwhile up at the mountain they were nuking 30+. But man, that cold is what I’ll remember about that trip. That whole month seemed like it probably had trouble getting above 10F up there. Prob a good number of sub-zero days on the summits I imagine.

I was up at Jay peak in early February that year...it was around a week to 10 days before the vday storm.....and there was light snow cover all over New England. I left ORH with maybe 3” on the ground and by the time I got to N VT outside of Jay it was maybe 6”....I drove up into the mountain and went into a cloud of currier and Ives by the time I got to the lodge, there was maybe 2 feet OTG. It was evening...I woke up the next morning to an absolute upslope blizzard. Prob 8-10” new...I think they got 30 inches out of it. The thing that stuck with me was how fooking cold it was during the snow. It was like a 5F upslope blizzard. Not one of those 20F jobs. That month was damned cold and that frigid upslope event is always the memory I have of it. It was almost uncomfortable to ski in it with the wind and those temps...even for a diehard like me who doesn’t mind the cold.

It was the latter....I don't think we had any events that exceeded 8-10" in that month (maybe some rogue 12 inchers...esp CNE)...but we got hit by like 4 overrunning events plus a norlun that dumped 5-10" over a largish portion of E MA and SE NH/ME. The Kocin pattern comment was merely to observe that we sometimes obsess over the perfect setup only to be blindsided by a 40 inch month with a southeast ridge.

Even Dec 2013 wasn't exactly a Kocin Cookbook pattern, but we got walloped by a few storms that month

2008 was kind of similar too

Bummer, that puts all of New England out of the goods. There's always 2021-2022

I’d take the over at this point on 2035. We’ve basically had no trend in volume loss going back to 2010. You’d like to see something more discernible. Maybe there is another notable step-down currently in the works that will soon change the odds.

There's a lot of weak ice in the Beaufort/Chukchi region so I'd expect extent losses to accelerate again soon as a lot of that melts out and/or compacts, but we've lost any chance at a new record. I'm still expecting a top 3 lowest extent and area finish.

Euro seasonal is better than the others but in an absolute sense, it is still pretty inaccurate. It absolutely shit the bed last year even on the October and November versions IIRC. I also like to look at the H5 anomalies and not the 2m temp anomalies...they often don't seem in sync and the H5 anomaly forecast is going to be easier for the models to hit. IIRC, back in 2013-2014 and 2014-2015, it was showing these monster ridges over AK/EPO region (that largely verified) but they had warm anomalies in southern Canada and into most of the CONUS which is totally at odds with that pattern. So the H5anomaly was a lot more accurate for forecasting the sensible wx than the 2m temp anomaly.

I don’t think anything looks particularly bad. The N ATL cold pool is kind of annoying but it doesn’t drive the pattern...it can just act to reinforce a +NAO if it stays that way. Weak Nina is actually a pretty decent enso state. Most of the other stuff is pretty stochastic and not easy to forecast.

We’ve now fallen behind 2012 on both area and extent for losses. It didn’t take long to close the 800k extent gap. There is a good amount of weakened ice in the Beaufort/Chukchi sector, but I don’t see us finishing below 2012 on either metric.

The ice bath sitting there in the N ATL doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence for the NAO. Hopefully it doesn’t end up mattering. GOA has been cooling a lot too recently though still above average while the warm pool south of Aleutians has been strengthening....wonder if the PDO will try and go negative this winter.

Yeah weak Ninas are good for snow in December. Ninas in general are good for snowy Decembers but you are right that the weak ones seem to have fewer duds mixed in. Dec 2016 was kind of near average. But Dec 2017, 2008, 2005, 2000, 1995 were all above average for the most part (2000 was kind of meh along the coast but good inland)...Dec ‘71 wasn’t great but Nov ‘71 was lol...and then the rest of winter was big. Dec 83 was similarly good inland but pretty mediocre right on the coast.

You weren’t supposed to tell them about our anti-VT group PM.

A lot of member social media groups are filled with chickenshits who either: 1. Want to stir up trouble for fun 2. Actually believe the crap they are typing but are too scared to say it without the “safety” of groupthink 3. Think their opinion is way more important than it actually is 4. Or all of the above. Agreed on the toxicity. No use wasting time in an environment like that.