Estimated 6" here as best as I can tell, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. Had a solid 3" when I went to bed at 3:00 am before it started blowing around a ton. Have 1-2' snow drifts everywhere.

Got fairly close to blizzard conditions at NHK at times (a few obs near gale force sustained and 1/4 mi vis.). Still getting light accumulating snow (occasionally moderate) with good flake size. All dendrites.

2.5" here. Steady moderate to occasionally heavy snow. Getting increasingly wind-whipped and blown. Small to medium sized aggregates (mostly dendrites).

Low looks to be tied almost entirely to the coastal front, putting it on the far western side of the envelope. Should keep the snow around longer since it will take longer for the northern stream shortwave to kick this thing out to sea.

Getting a few larger aggregates. Snow is mainly dendrites and stellar plates, with a few columns mixed in. Looks like most of the lift is in the DGZ tonight, which should result in some good snow growth, albeit dry, given the low column temps.

Getting blasted under this new f-gen band. <1/4sm. Small flakes, but tons of them. It's headed up your way, Prince.

Lift associated with coastal front is headed in to the eastern shore. Should be seeing some localized rippage with that.

Blizzard warnings out up to SBY and OC.

Coastal front looks to get going this evening. Could really cash in with that on the eastern shore.

Sorry, meant to pipe in here earlier. Looking decent for some banding to set up somewhere over the central or southern Bay out towards the eastern shore. Could be a couple of strong or intense bands as the low bombs off of OBX and moves NNE then NE. Placement is sketchy, since there's some uncertainty, but I do think there will be a very sharp cutoff on the W/NW side due to dry advection and mesoscale subsidence away from the better (focused) dynamics near the bay shores and eastern MD shore. Looking like a LFI-SBY or ORF-DOV special atm. If the latest trends in the upper levels on the GFS and NAM are any indication, then the max may be closer to LFI-SBY line. They're safely away from any possible mixing and close enough to get into some of the more intense frontogenesis and mid-level WAA.

I wouldn't expect miracles. Cloud top temps are still marginal, just somewhat better than they are now, which could be cold enough for some moderate snow.

Wouldn't get too discouraged just yet. We should get a decent parting shot from the deformation zone as the low deepens and moves northeast further offshore.

Deformation zone should swing through and drop another inch or two, but barring some good mesoscale banding, that's gonna be about it, most likely. Poor snow growth outside those bands are going to keep accumulations down.

25 minutes ago, Lowershoresadness said:

don't really know what's falling right now. it's bouncing off my jacket so there's that

Probably a mixture of snow grains and ice pellets (frozen drizzle in this case).

Definitely. Had 3" here at one point. Melting, light mixing and compaction brought that down a bit. Maybe an inch and a half left close to the shoreline.

Winter temperatures DO matter -- to an extent. My personal favorite is freezing degree days, but you could use other measures just as well. I use FDDs because of the easy relationship to ice thickening. Ice grows quickly at first, but growth slows as it insulates the underlying water from the atmosphere and slows heat exchange. This principle works in reverse: a degree or two of warming doesn't matter all that much at first because the loss in spring thickness is initially small. However, further warming causes increasingly larger spring thickness losses as the relationship of FDD anomalies to ice thickness is exponential. When you start dropping below 2500-3000 FDDs, the spring thickness loss rapidly drives upward. The critical point (based on PIOMAS thickness experiments) seems to be around 1.6m. Below that thickness, ice doesn't survive the summer in the basin, almost no matter how favorable the weather is.

Add 2C to last winter's ridiculously warm winter and place a 2007 or 2012 style summer on top of that and you've pretty much got a blue Arctic Ocean at the end of the summer. That kind of scenario is probably 15 years away still.

Translating that into Arctic temps might yield a 1C cooling. This is highly speculative, of course, and depends on the timing and size of an eruption (if any).

VEI 5/6 eruptions in that portion of the globe are particularly effective in lowering global temperature. The effect would be on the order of 0.2-0.3C, provided the same eruption size. A weaker eruption might be closer to 0.1C, and a VEI6 may get closer to 0.4C. Peak cooling is generally 12-20 months after an eruption of that magnitude, though the tail can last up to 4-5 years. There is typically a rebound effect above the baseline a few years after a major eruption as masked radiative forcing emerges over a cooled surface.

1 hour ago, Jonger said:

Warmest month for where?

Arctic (66+N).

Last winter will be tough to beat, as the Oct/Nov temps were extremely warm. Who knows, though.

1 minute ago, LVLion77 said:

A weakening (damaged) hurricane over warm water will be entering relatively cool water of the open ocean soon in the wake of jose and will spend the rest of its life over relatively cool water. The ssts along the coast don’t help either- range from the upper 60s in va to upper 70s along nc coast. What component of basic climatology indicates this will be a catastrophic situation for the coast?


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Careful of putting words in people's mouths here. Nobody is saying it's going to be catastrophic. As for the SSTs, see the latest NHC discussion. If Maria is in the left half of the envelope, she will avoid Jose's wake and probably enter a region of relatively weak shear as the ridge breaks down. She'll be near the Gulf Stream at that point, so while it's not expected to be a major hurricane at that point, it could be stronger than originally thought by that point.

12Z GFS is a little slower breaking down the ridge and a little faster with the track speed. Also, the handling of the SE upper low was a bit different and further SE, causing more of a NW bend. This solution is pretty close to the EPS control and mean from last night. Definitely a bit concerning considering the steady westward trend in most of those members. We're getting inside the D5 period though, so adjustments are typically smaller inside that timeframe. The breakdown speed of that blocking ridge is going to be pretty critical to how close she gets.

As we move into the re-freeze, the summer pattern is fading and is being replaced by a now-familiar sight: strong to extreme blocking near the Kara/Barents and Scandinavia.

ERC progressing alarmingly rapidly per recon data and radar. Outer max already has stronger winds than the inner max. At this rate, she'll be done in a few hours.

4 minutes ago, eyewall said:

From the 8pm advisory:

 

Wind speeds atop and on the windward sides of hills and mountains
are often up to 30 percent stronger than the near-surface
winds indicated in this advisory, and in some elevated locations
could be even greater.

Yeah, we're talking wind speeds that can debark trees, cause ground scouring and deform reinforced buildings.

1 hour ago, bluewave said:

 

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0693.1

 Extreme warming in the Kara Sea and Barents Sea during the winter period 2000 to 2016

 

Abstract

The regional climate model COSMO-CLM (CCLM) is used with a high resolution of 15 km for the entire Arctic for all winters 2002/2003-2014/2015. The simulations show a high spatial and temporal variability of the recent 2-m air temperature increase in the Arctic. The maximum warming occurs north of Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea and Barents Sea between March 2003-2012 and is responsible for up to 20°C increase. Land-based observations confirm the increase but do not cover the maximum regions that are located over the ocean and sea-ice. Also the 30 km version of the Arctic System Reanalysis (ASR) is used to verify the CCLM for the overlapping time period 2002/2003-2011/2012. The differences between CCLM and ASR 2-m air temperatures vary slightly within 1°C for the ocean and sea-ice area. Thus, ASR captures the extreme warming as well. The monthly 2-m air temperatures of observations and ERA-Interim reanalyses show a large variability for the winters 1979-2016. Nevertheless, the air temperature rise since the beginning of the 21^st century is up to eight times higher than in the decades before. The sea-ice decrease is identified as the likely reason for the warming. The vertical temperature profiles show that the warming has a maximum near the surface, but a 0.5°Cyr⁻¹increase is found up to 2 km. CCLM, ASR and also the coarser resolved ERA-Interim Reanalysis show that February and March are the months with the highest 2-m air temperature increases, averaged over the ocean and sea-ice area north of 70°N; for CCLM the warming amounts to an average of almost 5°C for 2002/2003-2011/2012.

 

Yeah, pretty remarkable warming in that region.

Also see:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28386025

Quote

 

Greater role for Atlantic inflows on sea-ice loss in the Eurasian Basin of the Arctic Ocean.

Abstract

Arctic sea-ice loss is a leading indicator of climate change and can be attributed, in large part, to atmospheric forcing. Here, we show that recent ice reductions, weakening of the halocline, and shoaling of the intermediate-depth Atlantic Water layer in the eastern Eurasian Basin have increased winter ventilation in the ocean interior, making this region structurally similar to that of the western Eurasian Basin. The associated enhanced release of oceanic heat has reduced winter sea-ice formation at a rate now comparable to losses from atmospheric thermodynamic forcing, thus explaining the recent reduction in sea-ice cover in the eastern Eurasian Basin. This encroaching "atlantification" of the Eurasian Basin represents an essential step toward a new Arctic climate state, with a substantially greater role for Atlantic inflows.

 

Building a solid inner core in a hurry. This has the potential to spin-up very quickly once it does so. We'll see what happens with the diurnal max tonight.

3 hours ago, nzucker said:

If we have a relatively -AO winter with limited Fram export, and another cold PV dominant summer following this relatively benign melt year (6th to 8th lowest extent), then we may have a chance to get back to pre-2007 conditions. It definitely appears the ice pack has stabilized somewhat.

And yes, Friv disappeared when the big melt years ceased. Interesting to see the bias of different posters on here.

While I don't think we'll melt out before 2030, I really think it's unlikely we recover to pre-2007. Part of that is the consistent loss of ice in the Beaufort Gyre region, which has flipped from being a system which recirculates MYI from season to season to a system that effectively destroys it (this year included) due to melt before it can be recirculated. Another is the remarkable amount of shoaling of warmer Atlantic Water (AW) on the Eurasian side of the basin. The forcing from this oceanic input is substantial. These factors alone are enough to prevent a MYI recovery. Without a sustained recovery in MYI, a FYI dominated basin will always be susceptible to summer melt-out, even in somewhat cooler-than-average summers.

The downward trend in April volume (which has a fairly large correlation of about .4-.5 to Sept. volume) has not stopped or slowed down. Unless that changes, this signal will eventually overwhelm any temporary gains due to cooler summer weather in the long run.

Bottom line -- predicting imminent doom or recovery in the pack at this point kinda leaves the predictor as a hostage to fortune.