So I am far from an expert on these issues, so take this with a grain of salt, but I'm actually not that surprised that this went north. There's one big ingredient missing and that's the PNA. If you look at the composites of a major snowstorm, we should have a ridge over the West coast, ideally centered a little bit inland, instead, we have a trough there. We should have a negatively tilted trough centered to our southwest, instead we had a Southeast Ridge. We could have done well if the southern stream and northern stream stayed separate, from a longer overrunning event like some models showed, but once it trended towards phasing out west, it was really inevitable that it was going to go north. The upper level pattern looks much more like big ice storms than big snow storms.