ikcarsky

Tuesday – Added another 1.5", totaling 3" of lower ratio stuff than the 3" on Sunday.  It accumulated until around noon so it was actually more impressive than Sunday where rates were too light during the day to combat insolation.

Wednesday – Heavy snow late afternoon driven by daytime heating and cold 700 mbar layer.  Great rates, estimated a quick 0.5".

Thursday – A "fun surprise" of my own early morning, good rates early and about 1".  "Fun" because I had to drive to work during peak rates.  Intensity let up the moment I stepped out of the car (naturally).

Add Sunday 3" and that's 7.5" over five days (Monday may have had a trace idk).  With temps generally less than 40 every day making for a decent winter-going-on-spring feel by my Midwestern standards.

I knew someone would really cash in with this dynamic ML energy after I got Severe T-storm warned thundersnow Saturday evening.  Bad Kuchera maps let much of my sub down but better late (farther east) than never, congrats to all that made bank on a wild one.

1.5" of fluff so far this morning.  Started off with nice dendrites and good rates between 5 and 5:30 AM with a brief but intense wave of forcing that was poorly handled by models (only yesterday showed up and only on high res).  Light pixie dust continues.  Loving the midwinter feel.

 

Amazing how insolation can nuke a thin snowpack down here even when temps stay below freezing.

No -10's in ABQ, but might get close to 0 tonight.  Forecast low 6.

Filtered sun overpowered the flurries and temps hovering around 15 this afternoon to make roads pretty good.  Now that snow showers should end soon safe to say my final total is 3" but compaction/sublimation already doing their thing.  Snowpack is widespread though, hope it's sturdy enough to reduce the risk of rain with the clipper tomorrow by holding down temps just that extra degree.

 

Woke up to 2.5".  Pavement has 1.5"-2" so not as much lost to melting as usual.  Pixie dust still falling and radar shows several hours are likely yet.  Wind is DEAD CALM but the dull roar of the 60 mph canyon wind about a mile to my south can be heard, for which blizzard warnings were hoisted.  Eerie.

Clipper mentioned in the AFD this morning, is this ABQ or GRB?

LONG TERM...(MONDAY NIGHT THROUGH SUNDAY)...
A clipper system is soon to follow behind today`s Valentine`s storm,
beginning Monday night. Accumulating snowfall will begin across the
northwestern portion of the state late Monday evening. Precipitation
expands across central New Mexico through the day Tuesday and into
northeastern portions of the state Tuesday night. Both the 00z GFS
and ECMWF try to bring in a backdoor cold front late Tuesday night
that keeps precipitation in a convergence zone along and east of the
central mountain chain through Wednesday. The system exits late
Wednesday, with the GFS forming a closed low over the TX panhandle.
Temperatures were lowered below NBM guidance for Tuesday and
Wednesday, particularly across northeastern New Mexico, where snow
cover is likely to hang around for several days.

1 hour ago, raindancewx said:

The airport managed a staggering 0.03" with the line of thunderstorms. I just want the damn front to be through by Midnight. I hate when Arctic air comes in at 1 am and we have a high of 45 or 50 because it was that warm for 10 minutes very early in the day. I do like some snow for the city, but I think it's really a 3-4 hour window for Albuquerque to get snow. Some spots are probably going to get 6 inches in the NE heights, Rio Rancho, and maybe the West Mesa. I went 1-4", locally under 1" or up to 6" for the city.

Around 4 PM winds at KSAF went SW -> SE and temp started plummeting which hinted the Arctic air was cresting the mountain passes, about four hours ahead of schedule by my reckoning.  And now with the latest out of KABQ I think Albuquerque is officially in the same boat.  Precip should be snow from here on out.  Weenie mode activate.

The action had mostly passed by this point.  The really heavy precip was maybe 90 seconds tops, small dense balls of snow, like a snow/graupel hybrid.  But: thundersnow confirmed.

Lol -- real life 0z ABQ sounding had 37 J/kg of MUCAPE, gotta love dynamic systems

Severe Thunderstorm Warning

---

Severe Weather Statement
National Weather Service Albuquerque NM
615 PM MST Sat Feb 13 2021

NMC001-043-140130-
/O.CON.KABQ.SV.W.0001.000000T0000Z-210214T0130Z/
Sandoval-Bernalillo-
615 PM MST Sat Feb 13 2021

...A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 630 PM MST
FOR SOUTHEASTERN SANDOVAL AND BERNALILLO COUNTIES...

At 614 PM MST, severe thunderstorms with snow and hail were located
along a line extending from San Felipe Pueblo to Albuquerque, moving
east at 35 mph.

HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts.

SOURCE...Public.

IMPACT...Expect damage to roofs, siding, and trees.

 

Lightning!  Quite a show with the band ongoing north side of ABQ given the time of year, I'd say about 4-6 strikes a minute.  Lots of curly arcs poking beneath the cloud deck.  I don't even remember any instability progged by any model sounding, I'm quite impressed.  Very dynamic system -- gives me good feeling about snow tonight.

 

12 hours ago, Ed, snow and hurricane fan said:

I don't know how it helps, but per Direct Energy's precautions, I told my pipes they are stupid.

Insuring they're properly insulted, not ensuring.  You also need to take out a policy that will protect you from liability in the event the pipes aren't sufficiently demoralized by insults that are too shallow.

One thing I've noticed in recent days is the modeled longwave pattern is more stable I can ever remember it (at least on GFS).  Even out to ~240 hours, the positions of troughs/ridges from run to run predicted for a given date haven't been changing much.  I suspect this will change once we're back to a faster zonal flow pattern.

In the meantime T-24h to the main show, NWS ABQ going with 2"-4" for the metro area.  Nothing staggering but at least it won't melt right away.  Plus the Tuesday system looks juicier than a few days ago.

17 minutes ago, raindancewx said:

My guess is the system Sunday over NM will be the system that ends the severe cold pattern nationally.

 

NWS ABQ seems optimistic there could be a return.

GFS and ECWMF continue to prog a third system for Tuesday of next
week, keeping colder weather along with good chances for snow to much
of the forecast area. Drier and warmer weather appears on track for
late next week. The overall pattern in the Pacific is not expected to
change during the remainder of the February with additional trough
forecast to dig southeastward over the Southwest U.S. Credit a
convectionless EPAC with the MJO stuck in phase(s) 6/7 thanks to a
fading La Nina.

Models seem to agree on spitting out a low from the current NPac cyclone chaos that heads toward the West coast, undercutting a ridge that gets set up over Alaska.  Key difference is Euro has a weak Alaskan ridge on D5 which breaks down and retrogrades toward Siberia.  GFS/CMC are stronger and keep the ridge in place longer, which together with the NPac low looks to entice the NoAm TPV to extend westward and swing some truly frigid air down the Rockies all the way to the coast.  I thought I remember hearing the Euro had a bias with breaking down ridges too quickly but that may be in the tropics, I don't remember.

Serious cold all the way to CA on the 12z CMC Sunday morning, 8 days from now.  It's preceded by an awesome overrunning snow event for N AZ and NM.  Weenie 10:1 snow map paints 2'+ for some of the NM western mountains and generously spits out 1'+ to much of the central and western part of the state.  Even if this did come to pass looks like a good setup for a canyon wind down the central mountain chain and much of ABQ metro still gets snow holed.  Anyway this all looks dependent on some delicate wave breaking action to occur in the North Pacific Ocean in a few days due to the current maturing cyclone south of Kamchatka, which spins off some vorticity into the Gulf of Alaska on Wed that pulls on a lobe of the NoAm TPV, elongating it toward the N Pac, or something like that.  My mind boggles at all the NPac vorticity lobes phasing and shearing and puking on the 500 mbar chart tbh but it does assure me that what the CMC shows is not gonna happen.

On 1/31/2021 at 7:13 PM, dan11295 said:

FYI The website that has been linked regarding the HCQ and Ivermectin has had their Twitter account banned for over a month. They appear to be misrepresenting the conclusions of at least some of the referenced studies.

On the "website that has been linked" they quite literally bring up every study concerning the application of HCQ to COVID, disclosing which studies they exclude from their meta-analysis and why.  Significance of any given study is apparent and they note which are RCTs.  Methodology is given (appendix).  You even use the website itself as a source acknowledging that large CI in Mitjá et al.  How much more open, transparent, and unbiased can one get in a meta-analysis?

23 hours ago, KokomoWX said:

a representative group of 75,000 American adults: It has killed roughly 
150 of them and sent several hundred more to the hospital. The vaccines reduce 
those numbers to zero and nearly zero, based on the research trials.

The 0.2% US adult death rate is after a full year of this pandemic.  The final phases of the vaccine trials were compressed into a couple of months.  Still even if you take 30 adults in a two month period (death risk was never uniform over the year but whatever), comparing 30 to ~0 the vaccines still look good.  I won't deny they work well on paper but I advocate watching Israel to witness effects of mass vaccination in a "real world" setting.

Israel is up to 56% of its population having received the first jab (Pfizer).  Hard to really understand what is meant by "efficacy" in a real-life setting but data from Israel suggests the first Pfizer vaccine will reduce your chances of symptomatic COVID-19 by 30% to 60%.  Second dose 14 days later boosts that to >90%.  About half of SARS-Cov-2 in Israel is the B.1.1.7 UK variant, so quite promising.  But still lots of confounding variables in play for vax distribution in Israel is far from unbiased, being focused mostly on elderly.  Your risk reduction may vary.

Also noteworthy, the medical establishment finally seems to be talking about antiviral therapeutics in recent weeks (timing is coincidence I'm sure).  Colchicine in particular has received a lot of buzz lately.  Frustratingly the real world benefits of hydrochloroquine (+ AZ + Zn) and especially ivermectin still largely ignored, at least in the West.

1 hour ago, dan11295 said:

Who said natural immunity doesn't count?

WHO indeed!  Old source, new source.  Really gets the noggin joggin'.

5 minutes ago, madwx said:

this guy gets infected

Hey I'm done with it and it's great.  Maybe I'll try again with Strain B.1.1.7.  Hm, that has a terrible ring, too dystopian.  COVID-21?  There we go.

Central WI has been the dry slot hot spot these last few storms.  Where I'm staying the holidays (Stevens Point area) this storm dropped 1.5".  At least with Sunday's 2" the ground is solidly white now, sorely needed after a depressing brown Christmas.

 

6 hours ago, mattb65 said:

but make no mistake this disease is not one to be gambling with even if you're young and healthy. We have the means to safely vaccinate enough people to squash this virus to oblivion and we will.

Says you.  I took the gamble, got it, got over it.  Just doing my part to contribute to herd immunity, which I thought was looking good in the Midwest with ~10% of the population in ND, SD, WI, IA that have now returned positive tests and an immune population that is surely much higher.  Except now I'm being told that natural immunity doesn't count toward herd immunity, only vaccinations.  Really makes you think.

8 hours ago, mattb65 said:

These websites that you link to are full of misinformation with small poorly designed studies using garbage methodology to show clinically meaningless endpoints.

Here's a better source.

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/chloroquine-and-hydroxychloroquine/

Those websites I linked aggregate ALL studies that have been performed to date.  Yes that will include some poorly designed ones, and many observational studies. That knife cuts both ways though -- why would a recognized safe drug like HCQ increase the risk of mortality by a factor of >1.5?  I find that just as hard to believe as the risk multiplier of <0.2 in some of the studies.  Yet take them all together and the distribution starts looking pretty Gaussian and the mean risk factor is 0.7.  Is the potential to free up hospital capacity by 30% not worth the slight chance a patient or two will die of a heart attack?

I'm comparing the meta-analysis of your "better source" with article highlights from c19study.com.  It's proving to be an interesting exercise.  Their assessments of any given study are in agreement, yet the tone and overall conclusion is different: your source clearly states "CQ/HCQ is not worth the risk" whereas the c19study.com website clearly paints the opposite picture.  But the c19study website is more highly powered, so I'm siding with them

 

2 hours ago, mattb65 said:

Why would hospitals prescribe medications that have repeatedly failed to show any benefit in RCTs?

Because they work.  HCQ looks good when given early, see image.  Ivermectin looks good even with late treatment.  And your statement is false.

CFR's are way down from the spring as we are catching more cases.  Same is true in Europe, countries like Italy are posting CFRs ~1%, compared to ~10% from the spring.  So calm down people, things are not quite as bad as they were in the spring -- yet.

It would also help if hospitals were allowed to administer HCQ+AZ+Zn and/or ivermectin+doxycycline therapies to improve patient throughput.  But I'm not holding my breath there.  In the meantime, just gotta keep taking Vitamin D and zinc.

Here in east ABQ (Cibola Addition) we got 6" by dawn Tuesday, and almost another inch early Wednesday morning.  Snow cover on vegetation in shaded areas stuck around until late yesterday (Friday).  Biggest blast of winter I've experienced since I moved here from the Midwest last year.