ORH_wxman

The daily area did start falling again....but it was only 18k. Down to 2.981 million sq km....the min so far was 2.877 on August 24th.

That's the 5-day mean, the daily area actually increased 20k to 2.999 million sq km. Not that the area matters much anymore for ranking purposes...this season will rank 3rd lowest for area behind 2012 and 2016.

There's some weak support for it...obviously we know how early it is and how quickly things can change.....but we've got a big warm anomaly in the GOA (positive PDO) and extending down into the adjacent north pacific. That's going to at least feed back on any ridging that tries to develop there (I won't claim it is the cause of such ridging). We've also got the best chances for warm SST anomalies in the ENSO regions out near the dateline. ENSO is weak and likely neutral, but it still probably helps on average to have that "west based" Nino look...heck, it might even be better this way than an actual El Nino because, like you said, maybe less chance for other ENSO-related factors to muck it up. We just get this weaker low-frequency backround humming that tries to force the tropical convection near the dateline....that then promotes ridging in our EPO region...which then feeds back on the big warm SST anomalies sitting there, and boom....you have that mass Siberian express pattern that gets stuck for weeks at a time. Who knows what the Atlantic will do...and obviously all those shorter-period oscillations will have a large say in our snowfall prospects, but the larger scale definitely has some weak support for cold idea.

Models continue to go more neutral on ENSO as we get closer. EuroSIPs and seasonal did too...so I'm getting increasingly more confident that we will be La Nada (neutral) this winter. Still a small chance we go weak Nino, but it's becoming more of a long shot. Subsurface looks weak...still some warmth to the west but the central and eastern areas are getting cooler in the subsurface. That's probably good though...even if we're neutral, we'd want the higher anomalies out west...maybe encourage dateline convection.

Between 1955-56 and 1971-72, ORH basically had zero years below average snowfall...they had one year (I think 64-65) where they had 62.8", so slightly below normal but I consider that normal when it's only like 10% below average. That period was amazing for its consistency. There were only maybe 3 or 4 winters out of that 17 that I would classify as "blockbuster"...it was just consistently solid. Normal or above normal with a lot of cold. Very cold those years. Then the early to mid 1970s flipped the script until we returned to epic cold and snow for a couple winters in '76-'77.

Yes they are. It's why I think people who haven't actually experienced a stretch like that won't truly understand what we're talking about until they do. Pretty much anyone born after 1985 or 1986 probably wouldn't remember...maybe a young weenie born around then would remember the early 1990s before the tide turned...but otherwise, they are used to never going too long without a huge event or blockbuster winter. Its even more spoiled for anyone born post-1994 or so...they wouldn't even remember the relatively dud winters of the late 1990s.

Logan airport went over 10 years without a 12" snowstorm. They had over a foot in the Feb '83 storm and then failed to get it again until the March '93 superstorm. They had some close calls in between but never hit 12". Then ORH went 4 consecutive years without a 10" storm from '88-89 through '91-'92. Only time that ever happened on record.

If I didn't know how close we were to getting so much more, then that winter wouldn't have been too bad. It was close to average snow here. Yeah, rewind to 1988 when you didn't know how much Baltimore was getting each storm and couldn't see computer models and the winter probably gets an average rating for most of SNE...sans maybe NE MA and the central CT valley.

I always get the itch to start them back up again, but then life gets in the way compared to my bachelor pad days . They are time consuming to make, but I do like having them as a reference to how a particular season played out. If I have some free time one day, I may start trying to catch up on the 8 seasons that I am behind. I'm actually really bummed that I lost my most recent map...the 2010-2011 winter. I was hoping someone on here saved it, but so far no luck. In the threads that it was posted in, I had used imagehosting links which are now defunct and I had created that one on a laptop that died years ago and foolishly didn't save it to my PC or newer laptop.

I said he was near average, but if we got very specific, he was probably slightly above average snowfall that season....and yes, mostly on the strength of the Dec '09 storm. But they also got some decent snow in the Feb 9-10 bust...like 6-8".

No, you were pretty close to average snowfall....Ray's current area was well below average.

There is no way the min would be that early.

I was looking at JAXA when I made the comments about extent. I agree NSIDC extent looks a bit less likely to finish 2nd but it wouldn't surprise me either. It only needs to have slightly above average losses...though the shape of the ice pack doesn't look as favorable for losses compared to years like 2016 when there was a lot more vulnerable ice left.

Area is very likely to finish in 3rd place given the path of 2016 from here on out. Extent is still looking like 2nd place is the most likely but the recent stall has made 3rd or 4th place more possible than it was a week ago.

Yeah you need a specific set of criteria for that type of progression to work out. If we exclude anafrontal storms like March 2005....it's usually massive bombs....like December 1992 and April 1997 (both changed over to snow in the CCB after 6-8 hours or more of heavy rain in eastern MA)....or super dynamic like December 9, 2005 flashing to heavy snow on the coast of MA after they had changed to heavy rain for several hours.

Your reference to the temp gradient in the '98 ice storm reminded me of the temp gradient on the morning of the 2008 ice storm down here. Never seen something so sharp in a storm here. Focus on eastern CT up into S MA....or even just east-central CT to far NE CT....talking about 25-30F over less than 10 miles. (much of the stations below 32F in central MA and SW NH were not online for obvious reasons)

FWIW, NJ did not get pounded in that storm. Too warm down there...they may have had some snow in the high terrain of NW NJ. Most of the dynamics were north of them....it wasn't as wrapped up as the Feb 2010 retrostorm.

I think it was a combo of going a bit too negative and also cutting off from the polar jet too much....just enough to turn it from wet snow into 34F rain. Apparently the models just didn't quite allow enough warm air to get pushed back into the interior. I think some of it too was there was a sense of hedging toward snowier as earlier that winter we had the epic positive bust of December 23, 1997 that dumped 18" (over 20" in Tip-land just tot he northeast) on a 1-3" forecast of marginal paste. That had caused mass outrage at weather forecasters and people stuck everywhere....it's a lot worse for traffic when everyone expects nothing and gets buried versus people expecting more and then being "pleasantly surprised" that not much fell and they can drive easier. Here's the renanalaysis of it: http://mp1.met.psu.edu/~fxg1/NARR/1998/us0224.php The reanalysis is't perfect because it shows ORH above zero at 850 the whole time, but it definitely was pounding heavy wet snow for hours in the early going. Probably the tough part about that one was they were upping the snow totals rapidly as it got closer. They were actually warmer with the forecast initially like 2 days earlier, but then they kept saying "things are coming in colder over the interior....we may have to up the amount in the Worcester hills"...and then by the night before, they were pretty gung ho and even moreso that mornign while the snow was pounding....they had no idea in real time that we were just an hour or two away from getting overwhelmed by the warmth aloft from the E and SE.

You talking the 3/2/18 storm? Was looking like maybe 5-10" eventually over interior but it took forever to change over. Only got an inch or two at the very end. Though Scooter loved the storm on the coast for the epic wind. The Feb 1998 storm was a bit different in that we weren't waiting to change over at the beginning. It was pounding and you don't expect to change to rain over ORH when you get a storm over the benchmark (both sfc and midlevels)

Yeah mostly ends up that way but not always. Classic example...2/24/98 over interior MA and even all the way back to ALB....winter storm warning for 12-18" of paste. Not much, if any by the time you got to 128 and forecast was always rain for BOS and nearby/southeast MA. But different story for ORH and up through monadnocks and into E NY state. It started off as planned...pounding heavy wet snow while about 10 miles inside 495 was raining. The snow line actually collapsed southeast a little bit as the dynamics increased and I remember Todd Gross coming on and saying Lexington and Bedford had flipped to heavy wet snow and mentioned they may have to up amounts in the 128 zone. Meanwhile back in ORH, we were ripping...had 4-4.5" by about 830am after it started at 5am or so. No end in sight either. Heavy echoes just streaming north. Then all of the sudden when really heavy echoes started moving in, the dreaded pingers were heard shortly after 830. Worst sound ever. They lasted maybe 30 minutes or so at 29-30F and the temp slowly rose to 32-33 and then we were all rain shortly after. I remember then around 11am the Mets were scrambling but said they expected the snow to collapse back southeast that afternoon and we'd still pick up an additional 4-8"...I thought "ok that is still salvageable even though this few hours of rain sucks". But then I noticed ALB went over to heavy rain not long after. I then knew deep down we were toast. I still hoped everything would collapse back southeast but it never did. Instead, we got nearly 3 inches of heavy rain at 34-35F on a benchmark storm track in February...the storm ended with a few pathetic wet flakes finally mixing back in. Even ALB and eastern NY had a bad bust...had to get west into the Catskills and out to BGM for big snows that never changed over. Worst negative bust of the 1990s by far for me.

The 1940s, 1950s, and 1980s seems to stand out as rather putrid years in Maine based on your data, tamarack. That actually matches ORH pretty well. I didn't have 1940s in my dataset, but if I did, they wouldn't be very good based on what I know from that decade at the older coop site. They weren't as bad as the '50s or '80s but still pretty cruddy. Your 1990s stand out for moderate events.

I really wish I could find it, but years and years ago, I saw a writeup on the Feb 1989 storm. It was of course in black and white PDF scanned onto some website and then printed back out. But it showed the old NGM paneled model forecast about 24 hours before the Feb 1989 storm and you could see why they were going nuts. We all remember how dry the NGM tended to be, and it was spitting out over an inch of QPF from NYC to BOS and all points in between back to ORH and HFD included. It had "the look" so to speak....not just QPF, it was thing of beauty in the midlevels with like 4 or 5 closed height contours at 850 and several at 700 even if a bit oblong. Looking at the reanalysis, you can probably see what was "supposed to happen"....that powerful southern vort energy was going to really swing around the base of the trough and "wrap back northward" and tuck that storm in closer to the coast....but the whole thing kind of gets pinched off a bit too quickly.....ugh, just looking at those panels is painful bringing back the memories that are still so vivid 30 years later: http://mp1.met.psu.edu/~fxg1/NARR/1989/us0224.php http://mp1.met.psu.edu/~fxg1/NARR/1989/us0225.php

Nothing was worse personally for me than the February 24-25, 1989 bust...it was similar to the one you described except it did get snow back to ORH hills...just it ended up being 3-4" of sand after 1-2 feet was predicted not 24 hours earlier. We were rewarded by WBZ channel 4 with Shelby Scott reporting live from Chatham, MA under 2 feet of snow and blizzard conditions long after the arctic sand stopped falling in ORH and the sun was already poking out. The bust you described may have been either late Jan 1987 or mid Feb 1987....that was actually a good season over the interior, but one of those storms absolutely demolished the Cape while giving nary a flake to Boston-westward except a brief burst that produced an inch or so from the WAA ahead of the developing shortwave...but the main CCB never made it back northwest of SE MA and the sun was out for much of it over the interior. http://mp1.met.psu.edu/~fxg1/NARR/1987/us0209.php http://mp1.met.psu.edu/~fxg1/NARR/1987/us0210.php Back in those days, there was always dread lurking behind the excitement of an impending storm. I was always excited, but after the first bust or two, I became wiser but at the expense of fun....we were waiting for the other shoe to drop constantly. Even in a 3-6" event. We'd see those types of events turn into an inch of slop washed away (waking up to the dreaded sound of cars splashing outside instead of that "muffled" sound of snow)....... or clear skies with stratus deck visible on the eastern horizon with semi-regularity. December 1992 was the turning point as you noted. That storm seemed to take a decade worth of frustration and turn it on its head. It was as if it almost mocked those who hated snow and started to enjoy our "new climate" of busts and underperforming snows in the 1980s and early 1990s...."here, take this 2-4" forecast and laugh about it turning into 34 inches blue cement-turning-into-powder combo." The 1990s still had their share of ratters and some busts....but you knew the tide had turned...the worst was behind us it seemed....and that feeling turned out to be prophetic as we went into the 2000s.

I should add in 1.0-2.9" events just to see if there's been anything going on there. But that would require a chunk of time for me to compile that data since there's more of those events, and I never started the process. I had already started doing 3, 6, and 12 thresholds over a decade ago. Anecdotal, but I swear 2.7, 2.8, and 2.9 were so damned common in the 2000s and 2010s looking at the ORH data. I can't believe how many times I left off an event because it failed to reach 3.0" by a few tenths or less.