ORH_wxman

Employment rate of younger adults/teens has steadily declined since peaking in the 1980s. Back then, ages 16-24 employment rate was 60%...it hovered around 58% in the 1990s and in the 2010s it's been consistently below 50% until 2017 when it finally made it back over 50% until the pandemic put a screeching halt to that trend.

Yeah the full fallout hasn't happened yet. That probably won't be felt completely until sometime next year. My guess is Q1/Q2 2021.

Yeah in most winters where I have a snow pack intact for weeks on end, it’s usually accompanied by multiple storms refreshing the pack every so often. You get the rare winter where it snows a ton and then rots for 3 weeks (this happened in feb 2014 after we got crushed like 4 times in 10 days and then didn’t get crap for the next 3-4 weeks...and the snow pack started to get those radar shards from sublimation) but I feel 90% of the time it’s inherent that you are getting snow to refresh it. In your area, it’s true to an extreme. You’ll get upslope in addition to all the synoptic stuff.

Having gone to college out in central/western NY and also chased while out there, I have a love/hate relationship with LES. I think in the middle of an intense LES event can be hard to top...especially when it’s perfect snow growth and little wind...it’s almost magical seeing the 5” per hour stuff just stack straight up. But there is definitely a post-storm depression aspect of it when you look and it’s all compressed down to one third of its original depth within a day or two. Also, when that big event is elusive and you’re just seeing these 1-3” type events while it’s ripping 10” of high-QPF snow off to your east, it gets very frustrating very quickly. You start craving even a 6-7” synoptic snow with some meat to it.

Probably a good move re: NH plates. I definitely expect some states to freak out again this fall when cases jump back up (and they will), and that could affect access to ski resorts.

I was in BUF like 10 days after their 82” storm in late dec 2001, and it looked like they had gotten like 20”. LES is pretty sweet when it’s happening but the staying power is hideous, lol. Unless you’re in a place like the tug hill where it basically never stops.

Sometimes I feel that way but then I think about how many cold Marchs and Aprils we’ve had recently...although this year March was finally a torch again but then April took a dump on our face. Its also funny, we were getting so many warm Novembers for a while but the last couple have been absolutely frigid including our coldest November day on record in 2018. Recently, February has been a torch too after a string of cold and snowy ones from 2013-2015. Going on a strictly empirical analysis, December has warmed the most in our area (about 0.5F per decade) while January (about 0.15F per decade) has warmed the least out of the winter months. If you want the one month that hasn’t warmed at all (at least quickly looking at ORH airport since it’s inception in 1947)...October is your month.

I’ve always thought there was pretty compelling evidence that the 134F wasn’t real. Its a much tougher case to say for sure it was under 130F, but I don’t think questioning the 134F is that nefarious.

Historically there have been some crazy swings in temperatures in the ice cores and sediment cores. The Holocene has actually been unusually stable compared to previous epochs.

Yeah I think the Younger Dryas event about 13,000 years ago was the most cataclysmic climate event in the past 50 or 100 thousand years....and there's some evidence is may have produced mass cooling of several degrees C in as little as a few decades.....still off by a few orders of magnitude to the movie's days or a couple weeks if we're being generous.

There was a paper that came out maybe 7 or 8 years ago that was showing what snowfall averages would be across the US by the 2030s/2040s. The numbers were laughable....using their percent reductions by region, it would put ORH somewhere in the mid 30s inch range and BOS in the low 20s. If you took all of ORH and BOS winters that were torches (say more than 2F above average)....they'd average well above those projected values. I remember at the time running the numbers...I think BOS was like around 28-29" for their top 10 warmest winters and ORH was around 48-49". Sometimes these papers just don't pass the smell test....makes you wonder how they get through peer review. But then I have to remind myself that many of these people aren't scrutinizing snowfall the way some of us sickos do...they are probably more concerned with temps, and then throw the snowfall in there to perk up the paper. But still....if you're gonna throw in snowfall, make sure your numbers look realistic. As for the midwest/Great Lakes....they are in one of the areas of the CONUS that has seen the least winter warming in the last 30 years....the upper plains/upper Rockies actually has a cooling trend since the late 80s/early 90s....the Great Lakes and upper midwest are more like flat. It is definitely a result of these more commonplace AK ridges that we've seen the past 10-15 years....they really drive the cold air south into the northern plains/rockies and lakes....New England has been on this at times but not to the extent as the midwest/plains.

There's also unknown negative feedbacks....ala Hansen et al's "Day After Tomorrow" scenario where we see a mass Northern Hemispheric cooling event via the AMOC gone haywire. My original point wasn't really to take the "realistic" worst case scenario numbers as ironclad....more just add some relative probabilistic logic to the idea that Maine would become like NYC/EWR. The worst case scenarios require some "questionable" assumptions about energy use (such as reverting to so much coal that we have a 7-fold increase from current-day usage....this despite that coal has likely already peaked globally circa early/mid 2010s)

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.