Ephesians2

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.

When do entries close?

How good is the HRRR precip type algorithm? Is it like the Euro with a lot of sleet depicted as freezing rain? Here it looks like the sleet zone is pretty narrow compared to other models. Do you think that is legit?

Good trends overnight

I genuinely don't understand what Blacksburg is thinking. My point and click adds up to 8-14", more than any model except the GFS

At 69h it's a bit further north with the mix. Snow maps are not going to look as good because it doesn't have as much of initial thump

18z GFS at 60h moved the mix line like 50 miles south. It looks even more deamplified. Sticking to its guns. Might be a bit drier, but I'm not sure if that's due to it being slower.

I'm surprised Blacksburg posted this at 3:30. They seem to be giving the GFS a lot of weight

Blacksburg is really bullish still.

To be honest it's more like a reversion to the mean from a model that was much more amplified and warm than any other model.

With such a strong west based NAO block on the models, I think that suppression or an easterly track is a bigger risk with this opportunity, unless the blocking ends up being weaker than the ensembles currently show.

GFS was a hold, with double digit snowfall totals for Central Virginia with much less freezing rain. It hasn't exactly been performing the best, but at least didn't trend in the wrong direction

Is the PDO even negative anymore? If so, nowhere near as much as it was a few months ago. We have warm water up against the west coast and while the waters off Japan are warm, they aren't as warm as they have been.

legitimately concerning. my gut feeling is that the worst of the freezing rain ends up in southwest VA into western NC and the western half of the southside (Danville/Martinsville area) and we get more sleet than freezing rain, but regardless, someone might get an inch of ice accretion from this. The main thread does think the Euro is counting a lot of sleet as freezing rain. Note: this is the estimate of actual ice accretion, not QPF falling as freezing rain which is overdonee

Ice accretion NOT QPF hopefully most of this is sleet, but if it's not, that's going to be absolutely crippling

Euro looks a few degrees warmer at the surface than other models.

I am promising myself that I am not going to get as invested into this potential as I did in this weekend's storm and it's still far out, but ... We have a more southwest-based block on the mean, as well as a positive PNA instead of a negative/neutral PNA. We were always relying on overrunning this weekend, which the early phase out west messed up, but this is more of a classic coastal storm look. And maybe less likely to trend NW if we get anything because of the strong blocking.

NAM is really amped and pushes the mix line north fast. To be fair its the NAM at range... (However, it's only slightly worse than 18z)

Euro is a slight bump north... :/

I will leave the upper level analysis to people who know more about it, but the precip shield and mix line moved South at least 50 miles at 78h It is still going to be more amplified than we would like it but it is an improvement.

NAM is going to be at least a SLIGHT improvement from what I've seen in the main thread

Everything came together perfectly from the perspective of producing as close as possible to the theoretical maximum for a single storm in our region.

Probably going to be me tbh. Will be getting an indoor-safe propane emergency heater and some extra wool blankets tomorrow after seeing those Euro runs.

Why is there very little sleet on the Euro- just really snow and freezing rain?

12z ICON