WidreMann

It's slow. Takes a day longer to get precip into central NC.

12z GFS looks stronger with the northern stream system coming in late week and weaker with the system over the SW. I suspect we'll see a suppressed track as the model begins to lose the storm. We'll see if I'm right.

Low is much further north and east than 18z. Not a good trend.

Considerably warmer at 156 at surface, but then considerably colder at 162. Nice surprise.

The high doesn't have as much support and is tilted back towards the west rather than being a proper banana high. The downstream trough is also a little weather, so confluence will be as well.

It's called the mountains.

That's the wrong map to show. The shortwaves are flatter and weaker this run, all three behind the big one coming through tomorrow and Monday. Not sure if it's because we're getting into that time frame when models lose storms, or something else.

00z GFS is running. Only like 30 minutes before it's out far enough to know what's going to happen. And only about 26 more runs before the event. Hoo boy.

You thinking of the December 8th event?

And yet it's happened. Not saying the GFS will be correct (especially at this range, good golly), but highs can and do move out if their upper level support leaves. I can't count the number of times we've had a marginal wintry even or just very cold rain due to CAD that quickly leaves as a storm moves up the apps.

Also temperatures are fairly marginal through the event.

The Euro shows it changing to wintry mix part the way through, so that map isn't accurate. Looks like maybe 3-5" of snow for Triangle before changeover.

So I guess we're in agreement that climate change is happening and that the sea ice is reflecting a period of ever increasing warming. Right?

12z Euro shows broad trough returning to eastern half of the country. This has been consistent. Pretty big 850 neg deviations. GFS also shows this. After that, who knows.

Subsurface says we're going to an east-based Nino. But still weak.

It's true that we only have satellite records going back to 1979, but we do have other data going back further than that, some many tens of thousands of years or more. At no point in the past several centuries has the ice been in such a sorry state. Could it have been less during the Medieval Warm Period? Possibly. But the rest of the planet wasn't also baking, so the MWP could be reversed as its local causes receded.

But what would a similar weather pattern have produced 20 years ago? That's the question you have to ask yourself whenever there's a cold anomaly of some sort. Extent probably would have been a good bit higher, but now we have warmer SSTs and temps, so while its pace is great, it's still way behind the historical norms.

Looks like a weak east-based Nino to me. Whatever Modoki/central look we had went away a while ago. Whether this matters for the eastern US, given that it's a weak Nino, is probably debatable. GFS and Euro ensembles don't warm us up too much the first week of December and they keep hinting at transitory but significant cold patterns. I'll take that over big SE ridge for three weeks.

Given the general persistence of patterns in these past few years, I find it hard to believe that we'll have a mild December and then not also have a mild January, especially with that consistent troughing over Greenland. Not to say we won't have cold periods (as we've already had), but I would think that mild overall is better odds. We've seen, however, how even a week or two of a cold pattern can really perform for us, a la 2000 or February 2015.

This convergence makes it clear that the solution is probably correct. Lots of egg-on-face for folks in the Triangle who were pumping up the Fran 2.0 angle when the storm was still 4-6 days away and the models were showing a lot of uncertainty.

GGEM takes it slowly inland over eastern NC. It was the last outlier. It's still kind of an outlier in its northerliness, but not by as much.

Yep. The models have converged in a way that they were not a day or so ago. They show some track variance and some small detail differences, but the overall picture is pretty much the same among all of the majors (GGEM excepted).

The important thing is that the ridge over the SE is a bit stronger than 18z, which would argue for more of a stall and a more easterly track.

Is the 3k, or the regular NAM for that matter, a reliable tropical model? Don't both of them get their initial and boundary conditions from the GFS?

Indeed, the GFS and Euro show only 1-2" of rain for RDU and wind gusts topping out in the 40s at best. Any more shifts south and it'll just be cloudy and breezy. A far cry from what the public probably still expects from this storm. I was not sold on this Fran-like track that was all the rage Sunday and Monday, but I expected that a track up the coast and out to sea around the upper-level ridge would be the most favored scenario. It's hard to think that we'd get a stall scenario this far north in mid-September, yet now with these persistent big ridges in the eastern half of the country, I guess this may be the new norm.