ORH_wxman

Yeah and Sept might still be neg too...but the last week or two has def trended strongly toward positive....I had posted the SSTA map yesterday or the day before. We'll see if it reverses again...I'd expect it to, but no guarantees.

Pretty hard to find a +QBO/+PDO winter in a La Nina....but 2016-2017 is basically the only one. You could maybe include 1985-1986 but that wasn't really a La Nina. It was a negative-neutral that fell just short of weak Nina. The PDO could still go solidly negative....it can change quickly. Though we're clearly not in a longer term deep -PDO like we were in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

'09 and '11 were obviously huge Januarys in +QBO Ninas. 2017 was a furnace, though it did have a few snow events. If we want to extend back further with +QBO Nina Januarys....Jan 2000 was actually pretty cold/snowy in an otherwise garbage winter. Jan '76 was frigid and snowy and Jan '72 was mild and snowless but then rebounded big in Feb...somewhat rare for Ninas. So there's definitely some decent precedent for cold/snowy Januarys in +QBO La Ninas.

Oh wow, I actually have the falling into the hole GIF saved....

Powderfreak is next to me in the reindeer sweater pic....LOL. Eric made him like 5 feet tall. Tip is in the other toaster bath pic i posted. I had two in that post...one of Kevin and one of Tip.

The one where everyone was walking into the giant hole was always a good one.

Here's 2000-2001 to 2014-2015 minus the previous 15 years.....we definitely had a much more favorable arctic in those years versus the late 1980s and 1990s on the whole.

Here's the last 5 years compared to the previous 15....aside from any contribution by Hadley cell expansion, it's clear we're in a phase of much lower heights over the AO region. As we both know, that will enhance the height rises over the mid latitudes. Esp over Eastern North America and Europe.....exactly where we see the largest positive anomalies on that comparison.

Tip just fainted from Hadley cell nightmares.

I'd say best match for ENSO/QBO are 2008-2009, 1971-1972, 2016-2017 in that order.....maybe 1975-1976, 2010, 2011, and 1985-1986 in the next tier.

Yeah....a lot can still change obviously. But it's far from a lock we have a solid -PDO.

I thought we might be descending into a solid -PDO this winter about 3 weeks ago, but that has dramatically reversed the past week or so. Not that I'm complaining, a neutral/positive PDO can be pretty good in a Nina (ala '95-'96, '00-'01)....we'll have to see where this one goes. A lot can change between now and December, but interesting to see nonetheless. First image is SSTA and the 2nd image is the 7 day change. That's a classic look for a +PDO, seeing that warm water wrap up along the W Canada and AK shoreline while it cools south of the Aleutians

Subsurface is really cold under about 130W, so it wouldn't surprised me if Nina 3 cools a lot over the next 4 weeks or so.

Wasn't the storm like 126-132 hours out yesterday? Why would anyone expect it to stay on the models consistently at that range?

Should be interesting to see if this Nina gets a final surge into solid moderate over the next 2 weeks as there is a pretty big easterly burst forecasted in the trades. We actually have not had a Nina well into moderate territory (or stronger) since 2010-2011. This one would be a bit of a late bloomer like '07-'08 whereas '10-'11 was already rocking by mid/late summer.

Feb is often pretty mild in Ninas. Sometimes we get away with it though.

Yeah sometimes people even think warm ground might be a problem for accumulating snow at 1100 feet with temps in the 20s.

I had snow from that as well in 2008. Got a coating on the mulch that evening after it changed over. Wasn’t measurable though.

I had a thread on the old EasternUsWx forum titled "The October Snowfall Myth" and it went through the statistics of it. The biggest reason that myth gets perpetuated is because BOS (and HFD/BDL is similar too) has like a sample size of 4 Octobers in the last 50 years with measurable snow and they mostly sucked (2009, 2005, and 2011). You could include 1979 in there even though BOS got a trace, but much of the city had measurable. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of statistics would tell you a sample size of 3 or 4 is worthless in this context. But when we expand the sample to interior sites like ORH where we have double digit October snowfalls, the mean snowfall following years with measurable October snow increases to right around the long term mean of all years. (I.E., it has no correlation) Blockbuster years that had measurable October snowfall at ORH include 2002-2003, 2000-2001, 1960-1961, and 1961-1962.

We're in the post-mortem "let me spin my narrative from before the storm" phase of the event....I gotta give Kevin props to this part because he's skilled at it being the crafty salesman he is. It starts several days before the events where he's questioning whether people will get much of anything at all with everything to the west "just like previous events", and then he massages the expectations to the point where widespread 0.50-1.25" across SNE is a massive bust.

They got another 0.04 last hour so officially they are at 0.46”

Yeah they can be ok near the coastline sometimes, but the interior values are hilarious...how many times have we seen hurricane force gusts over the interior on those products? I think it was the April windstorm, the Euro had like 90mph gusts over a chunk of the interior.

Rain can be weird...I'd get a stratus gauge to supplement the PWS gauge. At least in winter, you won't have to worry since snow is much easier to verify.

Yeah seriously. There’s basically no analog for last year. Closest is maybe 1996-1997 but the late November and December pattern last year was even better than ‘96 and the post-Xmas pattern was even shittier than ‘97. Really bizarre. The big -AO bout in November too is usually very highly correlated with another sustained -AO stretch in the winter but it didn’t happen.