ORH_wxman

Yeah if your irons are pretty shoddy off the tee then it definitely makes sense to go with woods and just get more distance. A lot of amateurs don’t hit long irons well to begin with...so there is little point in using them at all and just stick with hybrids. My long irons are personally much straighter off the tee than woods so I’ll use them 3 or 4 times a round on a par 4. Most other holes I use a driver because my 3 wood isn’t any more accurate...maybe just marginally so. Only time I might use a 3 wood off the tee is on the occasional hole where it’s a sharp dog leg at about 240-260ish....so I still want a bit more distance than a 3 iron but I’m worried I may drive it through the fairway with my driver.

Yeah I mean there’s probably 4 or 5 holes anyway that would be in the 350-380 range (unless you are playing a really challenging course) and you can do just fine with low 200s off the tee but keep it straight. Then usually on most courses there’s 2-3 holes where you have a massive fairway with ample rough on each side that you can risk taking out the less accurate clubs. That maybe leaves you with 7-8 holes where you have to make a real decision on whether to trade accuracy for distance that might be very helpful if you can keep it in play.

How are you with a 3 iron off the tee?

The ice is the most compact going back to 2007 for this date...just ahead of 2013. We're narrowly ahead of 2012 for least area on record on this date, but 2020 currently has over 800,000 sq km less ice extent than 2012. In comparison, 2012 and 2007 were the least compact at this point though both would become very compact later in the season near the minimum. This tells me that we're likely going to see a huge slowdown in extent loss coming up pretty soon. 2012 has a huge area loss event coming up in the first 10 days of August, so I think 2020 is going to have to build a bigger lead on 2012 over the next week to have a good chance to finish below 2012 in area. Extent is a different story, that may be easier to achieve, though still not easy IMHO despite the current 800k lead. 2012's extent loss in August is unmatched in the record....so it's going to be all about "holding on" to a lead in 2012 as it will begin making up ground very quickly...and as mentioned above, the compactness of 2020 right now is going to make it harder to sustain big extent losses going forward unless we see a big area loss event.

Time to keep the big dog in the bag

Mansfield Hollow is 250 feet...pretty much the same as IJD.

I don't think it's that low. That's basically what the nearby coop averages (Storrs and Mansfield Hollow) with incomplete data....so you can prob add at least 6-10" to it. They are definitely bad snow holes though.

Willimantic is a local snow hole. Prob in the 40-45” range. While nearby elevated areas north and west are closer to 60”.

Just got back from Juniper Hills. Played the Riverside course and shot 39-45 for an 84. First round since 7/22 last year. So almost exactly a year to the day. Can’t complain. Played surprisingly well except one terrible stretch on 10-11-12 where I went double-bogey-double. That pretty much sunk me on the back but I finished par-par at least including sticking a 5 iron to 10 feet on 17 (long par 3)...missed the damn putt though by burning the edge. Thought I had it. Anyways, it was great just to be out again.

I want it a touch warmer. Around 70 and overcast is my favorite. Makes tracking the ball very easy and sometimes the overcast scares the crowds off (like your misty weather) Don’t want it wet to screw up my grip or have the water hydroplaning the ball across the club face.

Yeah GIR is tough to achieve on a very consistent basis. Even in my really good rounds, I’d prob get like 11 or 12 out of 18...unless I was playing a cow pasture with a 68 rating. The pitching game and scrambling was the easiest way to take several strokes off my game and then on those days where I was feeling it with my driver/irons, I could score really low. If you can get some consistent coaching/lessons, then you can probably get the iron game to a very high/consistent level where your “floor” is like 80-82...but most people don’t have that kind of financial/time commitment combo available to them. Golf is a tough game, lol.

Yeah that course had like a 73.5 rating or something back then. It was frickin’ hard. I assume it’s still similar as it would be foolish to alter a RTJ course very much. Those rounds I had there were just a combo of playing almost every day and running into some flukes as well. I remember on one of the 76 rounds I holed out a bunker shot that was easily going to roll off the the green to the other bunker but it hit the pin and went in. That kind of stuff happens when you are going good. And RE: your game....sounds like you were pretty close to getting into that 6-7 handicap zone where I peaked back in by age 18-20 years. Almost all the difference is the play inside of 100 yards at that point. The pitching game and scrambling around the green is probably where almost all my improvement came from going from scores in the 82-85 range down to 76-80 range. Theres some smaller improvement in the irons and such, but so much of the scoring came from consistently getting up and down around the greens and giving yourself legit makable putts from 50-100 yards out....frequently your birdies on short par 4s and par 5s.

Chris, my official peak I think was junior year. August/September 2001. Jeff Smith and I played like 3-4 times per week at Robert Trent Jones golf course...started before classes began in August and then we played into September before the weather turned uglier. For some reason, it just all came together in a 4-5 round period (that can happen when you’re playing so much). Smith was like, “dude you need to go out for the Cornell team again...”. You know that course isn’t easy...esp from the blues which we played all the time. I did this in a 4 round stretch....79-76-77-76. And I think each round adjacent to those 4 was like an 80 or 81. I couldn’t miss. The first 76 happened kind of by accident...I had played fairly well on the front but nothing crazy...shot 41. Then on the back like 5-6 holes in, he goes “dude you’re 1 under on the back”. Ended up parring in from that point for a 41-35. I’ll prob never reach that peak again. All downhill after age 20.

Yeah I’ve played about 2 times per year since I had my first kid. Second one was born last year and only got 1 round in. To be fair, I wasn’t playing much even before that from my peak days 15-20 years ago. I was maybe getting out 3-5 times per year...except 2014 and 2015 I managed to get out a little more and my game was coming back at that point. Had several rounds in the 80-82 range. Then the first one was born in 2016.... Suffice to say, my days of a 6 handicap aren’t coming back any time soon.

Playing on Tuesday for the first time this year. Only played once last year too. Either playing Juniper Hills (Northborough) or Shining Rock (Northbridge)

Yeah you gotta use standard dev so that you are comparing apples to apples. A place like BOS has a much higher variance on their annual snowfall relative to average than Stowe does or even dendrite or ORH. Likewise, mid-Atlantic cities have an even higher variance than BOS relative to their averages. Using standard deviation adjusts for all of this. Years where BOS gets like 90”+ is probably like when Stowe (village, not mountain) gets like 175”+. (Can’t remember for sure but I recall you saying 175 was a monster number for in-town snowfall)

There is a pretty decent covariance between NNE and SNE snowfall. It’s generally quite rare for one region to get smoked for the winter while another has a ratter. There’s exceptions in each direction of course. When I line up the NNE blockbuster winters, I’m usually saying “that was a good (or great) one down here”. Though if you have to pick a region with the lowest covariance outside of N Maine (might as well be in Labrador there), it’s probably yours. We tend to have the highest covariance with the southern half of Maine and then NH....no surprise, as those areas are most likely to share huge storms with us. But even when I look at huge N VT winters, most of them were good or great here. There’s a few head scratchers like ‘98-‘99.

The early 1950s were absolutely horrific for snow in New England. Those winters were torches too. You're gonna be like college kid who's only had a beer in high school and then does a keg stand their first party....lol. Even a ratter up there will seem great the first year or two. But once you get a real winter, then you'll start calibrating.

I think the closest I ever came to not reaching 4" was 1988-1989. We didn't reach a 4" event until 3/24/89. It was poorly forecasted too....was supposed to be all rain, but we had fat aggregates at 31F for hours late afternoon and all evening....had about 7" where I was in Holden, MA (just NW of ORH).

Yeah I do not care about local jackpots that much....they are fun, but I wouldn't sacrifice snowfall for them to occur. Like I wouldn't take a +0.5 sigma snowfall winter when many others were normal or below normal over a +1 sigma snowfall winter where say, NNE, was +1.5 sigma.

I think it depends on the jackpot fetish too....would you rather be in a local jackpot and get near normal or slightly below normal snow (ala last winter)? Or miss the jackpot and have solidly above average snow? I'm basing the stats strictly off total snowfall for the season....obviously not accounting for whether Scooter had more snow in Weymouth even if you were still doing ok (like 2014-2015). The two biggest NNE snowfall winters in the last 50 years are 2007-2008 and 1970-1971....one was near normal temps ('07-'08) and the other was frigid ('70-'71). I'm trying to think of some other blockbusters....2000-2001 in NNE, that was below avg temps. So was '68-'69...another blockbuster NNE winter.

Empirically, I think you still want below average temps, though the variance is high. 2016-2017 sticks out like a sore thumb. I sorted the winters in your sig based on snowfall. (I estimate the 2019-2020 snowfall...CON had 46 but you prob had at least 15-20" more I'm betting) If we sorted by precip, it would have a higher correlation I'm sure. (i.e., temps matter, but less than precip)

Tail end of 2017-2018 was a blockbuster period for SNE. I had about 40 inches in March 2018. The true M.A. blockbuster year was 2009-2010. They did do very well late in 2014-2015 and also late in 2013-2014.

It was a sneaky big storm for MA....really only SE MA got screwed

As an aside, the Euro has been forecasting a big burst in easterly winds across the dateline region....which may provide a boost. The La Nina tendency had been weakening over the past week or two, but we could see a resurgence.