ORH_wxman

Don’t think the dewpoint drain is quite there for a huge ice storm, but it’s getting mildly interesting with already over a quarter inch of glaze on winter hill in ORH.

Still glazed on winter hill. Temp has actually ticked down a few tenths the last hour to 31.4F from a high of 32.

Still a lot to glazing on winter hill. Temp 31.5F. Prob breaking even with sun angle right now but def accretion between about 8am and noon.

Pretty solid icing on winter hill right now.

Yeah this was super close to being a nuke....but just enough northern stream nuances to screw it up again.

Mixing with snow here now with a little elevation in NW Holliston. Big catpaw type mangled flakes clearly visible in the spotlight out back when there was nothing about 5-10 min ago. Too bad it isn’t going to last a few more hours. We would’ve pulled some accumulation. It’ll prob end just as it changes over completely.

Sensible wx is what most people care about at the end of the day. It’s like how in mid-winter, you can have a day where ORH is like 30/24 with spitting light snow. That day maybe ends up as +3. But nobody normal would actually consider that an above normal temp day. Esp since it was all driven by the min temps. It’s even worse imho in early spring like right now. You can have a 42/37 day with drizzle which is positive departures but nobody gives a fook that the low was 37 instead of 28. They consider that cold and miserable.

I love how in the movie, Morgan Freeman’s character, “Red”, is narrating how May is “one fine month to be outdoors in New England”. Every time I’ve seen that in the past couple decades, I always tell myself, “good thing they were too early to experience May 2005”.

Honestly, stay out of the thread if you aren’t going to contribute anything of substance and just continue to troll. I’ll help you out if you don’t want to do it voluntarily.

This has actually been telegraphed pretty well. Second week of March and beyond kept showing up as blocky. Unfortunately there’s not a ton of cold on that look so we prob gets lots of cold rain or slop threats. But a real system wouldn’t surprise me either if you get everything to line up.

Pretty strong sig on the GEFS for 8 days out. EPS has a pretty good sig too but it’s a little delayed and slightly different evolution. The GEFS look is definitely more likely to be snow.

The warmup looks nice. Good high pressure at times should make for some great days. Pattern looks like dogshit though once we get into the second week of March. Very cutoff-y looking.

Yeah we’ve had a lot of May cold snaps (some with snow) that were breaking records while months like June/July can’t buy a cold record….well, maybe mid June onward. We had some nasty early June record low-maximum type days especially in the 2000-2015 range, not quite as much recently. Conversly, the October snow has been increased frequency since 2000. I’m not sure if these are just coincidence or something else because those months have warmed in the means, but those individual cold episodes on a sub-monthly level have increased in frequency.

Yeah that is true. You can occasionally have a really nice spring that was still normal or chilly in the mean temps, but lots of sun. Though often the precip will drive down departures in the spring. Esp the later into spring we get….clouds and precip blocking out a May sun angle really helps keep temps down. If you look at the 2000-2009 composite, it was very wet in those springs which probably helped drive the departures down. In the past decade, our springs have run significantly drier than that 2000s decade.

Yeah if that had been more like a 2018 or 2020 spring we prob would’ve had regular pack into the 3rd week of April. Yeah we def want to root for high ACE. But even if it isn’t, I won’t be terrified of La Niña. I’d like to see some changes in the N PAC in terms of getting ridging more poleward but we can get good La Niña even without a ton of blocking. 2007-08 and 2016-17 are two relatively recent examples.

It’s pretty easy to empirically check these spring claims. The mean temp increase for April/May since the middle 20th century is about 2F. We’ve definitely warmed. But in shorter timelines it will be a lot noisier. If you start from 12-15 years ago, then we have cooled in spring because we had some furnace springs like 2010, 2012, and even 2015 was a warm one after the historically cold Jan-Mar period. For anyone who grew up in the 1970s/1980s/1990s, they will remember colder springs because that period was colder than any period recently, individual years not withstanding. Unless you’re memory is etched in 1991 which was a record warm spring in many spots.

There’s def some support for one last blockier pattern starting the 2nd week of March….we’ll see if it actually materializes. A March big dog would at least get this winter out of the bottom rung if we could improbably pull one off.

So far it’s been a tradeoff that is worth it. The bigger ticket events and big ticket winters are enough to outweigh the ratters. But certainly a few years of underachieving can test people’s resolve.

I’m not buying it yet but it would be ironic if when many of us are saying “just bring on the 70s”, we get our best period of winter with multiple threats with highs in Quebec. Something we haven’t been able to buy for 2-3 years.

Originally forecasted to whiff SNE about 4 days out. Really trended north big time inside of 60-72 hours.

Yeesh dude…did you memory-hole the 2016-2020 period? I think like 4 out of 5 of those were fooking nuclear crater landscape near 5/1. Awful springs. We did have some better ones recently like 2021 and 2023.

Was actually a nice day to throw the football in the driveway with my oldest. It was around 34-35 when we were out but it felt warmer in the sun…definite March feel to the landscape

Unless it’s a major event, I’m out too. But obviously there’s still like 5-6 weeks left for something like that. The problem with “being out” in New England in snow threats and cold in favor of warmth is that it rarely ever acquiesces to that particular demand. 2012 was a rare exception. Usually it’s mostly a shit sandwich which then makes me start rooting for snow stat-padder events because it beats 41F mist with a “nice” day being 54F self-destructing sunshine day.

We’ll need a wholesale hemispheric change where we establish a good cryospheric base from the lakes to S Canada…hopefully we’re able to do that next winter but no guarantees.

BOS to your area and even up to Cape Ann and then back into the Foxborough area has gotten porked relative to climo pretty bad the last 2 winters. Even worse than most other areas. S CT had been way worse previously but they got a bit of redemption this month. My area has been pretty bad too but at least I got 10” in the 1/7 storm. But some of that is def payback for the jackpots we were pulling out of our rears for years even in blah patterns.