TimB

Anyhow, my bar for next week is set pretty low. 3-4” combined from the two storms would make me happy.

So advantage at 18z to a model that cuts both storms in a way that absolutely sucks for us and gives us less than an inch combined. I’m ready for more misery.

Euro gives us a decent snow with the Sun-Mon storm and misses us well to the east with the one later in the week.

I’m encouraged by the trends. Euro has that decent advisory level storm about a week from now. I suspect that may be too early for anything good, but there’s a strong ensemble signal for something late next week. Ensembles generally show us winning the battle with the southeast ridge. Canadian ensemble looks pretty darn good even later in the period if you ask me, on the fringes of a potential Arctic outbreak in the Midwest and still away from the southeast ridge, so fingers crossed that keeps us in the storm track.

To that point, this doesn’t look half bad for an ensemble so far out. I know we’re looking for more than just an inch or two, but it’s probably not bad to have over a 1 in 4 chance of at least an inch of snow on D11.

It’ll probably be 11 to be honest.

I’d take a 14 or 44 or maybe even a 10 too.

@TheClimateChanger You’re usually my go-to for local climate record stuff so I’ll ask you. I’ve always assumed the January 1880 data (+15.7 temp departure relative to current normals with zero measurable snow, both all time records) was fake but I’m starting to reconsider that now that I see places like Columbus and Cincinnati were in a similar ballpark for temp departures. Is there a chance it could be real?

92-93 set the benchmark for how deep you can get into a terrible winter and still have it be saved and then some.

Maybe not the most believable evolution, but we’re in the game. CMC isn’t horrific either, but it’s more of a rain to minor snowfall event here with a monster storm that drops 2-3 feet in interior SNE. But that bullseye was in VA/NC on the 0z run, so there’s still a lot to be worked out.

Also, today’s low so far is 33. If PIT doesn’t get to 32 by midnight tonight, and it’ll be close, it will be the first time since observations moved to the airport that we’ve started a year with 6 days without a freeze.

The Euro’s depiction is even more frustrating than that. It’s a storm that rolls through the Deep South while we somehow still get into the 40s even with that storm track well south of us. This is getting comical.

Looks like no dice on thunder in the immediate Pittsburgh area today, at least not that I heard, and no dice on a record high. PIT topped out at 60, well short of the record of 65.

GFS has the weekend system as a nice little sub-advisory level but nonzero snow event. Canadian has, you guessed it, a cutter!

Hard to tell if this is just one of those years we never get the pattern or if it’s one of those years where we do get the pattern then end up with a 1/19/19 redux when we finally do.

We can hope. Spice up this boring winter a little anyway.

Pretty spot on. An absolutely perfect day if it weren’t December 30th. 64 at PIT, 66 at AGC.

Ha. My bookmarks also include xmACIS and the 5 min obs, so I guess he and I are on the same page. But good idea, I should bookmark the site with all time second tier American soccer stats so I can discuss ad nauseam with my Hounds friends.

Lol. This is as Bubbler as it gets.

The last part of my post, the part about the ensembles is what I find most disconcerting. As has been mentioned here before, we don’t really need to be all that cold relative to normal in mid January to get a storm, but this is a pretty hostile pattern overall and that part doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

0z models are all basically shutouts. GFS gets above freezing for afternoon highs all 16 days of its run. Euro doesn’t even really have a storm in the late next week time period. CMC pulls it too far west. 6z GFS has a workable solution where we get the fringes of a major mid Atlantic storm. At no point in any 0z ensemble run does our height anomaly get into the blue. Ensemble means for snowfall are pretty much as bad as they can get for a 16 day period in the heart of winter.

It’ll be interesting to see how high temps tomorrow can get. I could see it rivaling next Tuesday for the warmest day of this torch. Sunnier, too.

To a point, I agree. If it’s going to be warm and disgusting outside, which it is for at least the next week or so, give us as much of that warmth as possible. The record of 65 for Tuesday seems well within reach.

At the same time of day that it was -5 last Friday, it’s now 57.

It’s in line with the other models now, a rainy storm that tracks over or just west of our area.