vortex95

PT time in central NE on Sunday. https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1B8qsia4xS/ https://x.com/wxsarahk/status/2056137683366265143

We are so into the svr wx/warm season, it is easy to overlook winter-type events this time of year! Anyone happen to look at what will happen in the Central Rockies in the next 2 days? Going by the HRRR Kuchera it shows up to 51" in the Wind River Range in WY, 35" in the mountains NW of DEN, and 37" in the Uinta Mountains in UT. The RRFS shows similar totals. Looking at temps fcst for elevations 10,000 ft and above and 700 temps (10s and 20s F) and total QPF, these amounts do not seem unreasonable. Even Denver proper may get 1". Road trip for Scott? LOL! This is the second significant snowstorm this month for the Central Rockies, and while not a drought buster, it certainly will help. And this shows that you can't write off a winter as to snow records in this area until May is done. This is in spite of the record hot wx in March, which I think MSM just thought "that's it for snow - it can't possibly happen any more this season b/c of that record hot wx!" This goes back to what the MSM as to what they consider the snow season w/ an obvious bias to what happens on the East Coast. And in a larger climatic sense, what matters in the end is what happens for the entire season, year, or decades for rain/snow, not short period individual events within these. I realize that the Rockies snowpack this past winter remains record low stats, but for total snowfall and precip, it is, or will be, no longer in record low territory for many locations. This will be ignored by the mainstream. They only care about what happens in the here and now, taking a snapshot of record low snow earlier in Feb, and running w/ that, providing no context, perspective, or follow-up.

On the topic of the NAM going away and all the "consternation," remember what it can do w/ TCs. Look at this from Barry in 2019 (attached). 866 mb? Yeah, right. And you'd get hype-masters out there posting such as if it could happen! Barry ended up a min hurricane, but even that was really pushing it! Saw this... NAM 3km no longer turns off latent heat fluxes when RH approaches 100% at the lowest model level (as of 2017?). Despite the decrease in thermodynamic disequilibrium that happens in near-sfc air mass approaching saturation, hurricane-like conditions coupled with the model sfc parametrizations still force an unrealistic amount of evaporation into the boundary layer (you can guess what that does for TCs in the model . . .) . Capping those fluxes would be an artificial way to stymie extreme TC intensification rates, but it'd keep the model closer to reality. I believe they removed the global capping to improve forecasts of west coast marine fog, they weren't concerned with TC forecasts. So you can't have it all ways when it comes to mesoscale models/CAMs. There are aspects of the RRFS that performs better than previous models, and some that do not. Par for the course these days b/c it is not a linear challenge (more exponential) as you get more resolute and directly simulate atmospheric processes instead emulation/parameterization. And for the two big snowstorms this past winter, RRFS was not out to lunch. It did well and shows some mesoscale features in one of the storms that verified that no other model had. Shouldn't that be enough for ACATT?

Thanks for quantifying it w/ hard stats. I had never looked them up. So clearly the driest period in the last 60 years in the NEUS?

Yes, the last real multi-year drought in New England was in the 1960s, and yet the media has turned the word "drought" into a fear-mongering term, acting like its very existence is somehow atypical. Every time we get into a extended period (up to 6 months) dry here, it always seems to correct itself after this time. But that's not good for the fear-mongers, they just invented "weather whiplash" to still be negative/gloom and doom. What, do they expect gentle April showers all the time and no drought conditions ever?

How about "hot?" Somehow temps in the low 80s now have become "hot" on local TV forecasts. It all falls in pushing the "hot" narrative overall. 85-90 or upper 80s historically has been hot for New England in forecasts.

Given the sfc low tracked/developed right over SNE, are you surprised? Scott needs to look up his 700 low track rule for dry slots!

So WSR-88Ds can now go as low as 0.3 deg for BREF1?

One other thing, and this is biggie. The NAM has always been useless when it comes to TCs. It sucks w/ track and intensity, doing all sorts of odd things. It never was designed to handle TCs. The HRRR seems to handle TCs well, and no reason to think the RRFS will not be the same. I'll check further on this. Everyone seems focus on the negative for the "new stuff," but leaves out the shortcomings of the present, like the NAM guidance, that has sig drawbacks. One thing I will miss, the NAM MOS handles low-level cold air much better than the GFS MOS. Which brings me to another point, is there MOS-type output for other models, CAM and global? If so, what is a good site to view it? W/ NAM MOS going away, more and more will likely just look at 2 m temps (some do already), and run w/ them -- not good in the longer ranges!

CoastalWx *demands* a Weymouth specific fcst!!! LOL.

So it seems that only the 24 hr state record was set. They noted 38" storm total at Woonsocket for the Blizzard of 78. So the PVD storm total falls just short of the state record it seems? If we had the degree of detail for observations in Feb 1978 like we do now, you'd very likely find lots of 40"+ amounts storm totals (Scott would see to that!) both in RI and eastern MA. 44" was reliably measured in an open field in Woburn MA, and from pix I have seen people shoveling out walkways and standing next to "snow walls" the morning of Feb 7, about 3 ft had already fallen, and it was S/S+ for another 12 hr or so in eastern MA.

KCTH - Eugene Island 338K LA 28.196 -91.667 44m KEOP - Waverly OH KLQR -Larned KS KNBJ - Foley AL

Yes, I had never actually seen the full video until I looked it up earlier today! I thought that looked like Clapton! But the video starts w/ a mini movie, and the song does not begin until 2:25, so I opted out of posting that!