TimB

Can’t read stuff about the climate of that planet without snickering. Get to a paragraph like this and it’s over: The reason why Uranus is so cold is nothing to do with its distance from the Sun. Billions of years ago, something big crashed into Uranus with so much force that it tipped the planet over onto its side. Uranus still rolls around the Sun on its side today. The impact of the crash also let some of the heat that was trapped inside Uranus escape.

Shit, you’re right.

Draw the line for us here: what is weather and what is climate? 1. This winter has had an average temperature of X degrees at MDT. Unquestionably weather. 2. This winter has been the warmest winter since 19XX at MDT. I still say weather, but bordering on climate. 3. Winters in the 2020s at MDT have had X% less snow than winters in the 1970s. Probably climate. Granted, all 3 of these types of posts appear in this thread from time to time, and sometimes stats from DuBois, which is about as relevant as East Nantmeal Township (though the latter never gets any pushback, curiously), but some of the posts in question are genuinely about weather and not climate.

NWS is so goddamn lazy in their forecast discussions. The long term still mentions the Midwest omega block and northeast trough that are long gone. Well, I guess the omega block is over us but the troughing is offshore.

Hard to be miserable when it’s going to be 53 and sunny this weekend. Hope you get to golf.

I can actually get behind the idea of the weekend being warm and sunny and downright springlike, but it really is incredible how fast the models flipped it from cold to warm at fairly close range.

I was talking specifically about the three Januaries he mentioned, two of which were very snowy and the other wasn’t snowy, but part of another historic winter. The three Januaries ahead of this one in precip totals in his area were all part of epic winters, and this one won’t be. To deny that is to obfuscate.

My (correct) point is, nowadays when a winter month has a lot of precip, it’s almost a sure bet that most of it is rain. But two out of the three past winters you mentioned had wet months that were mostly snow. So in the past, an anomalously wet winter month could be rainy or snowy. And snow has not been the predominant p-type this winter, lol. Also, we were talking about January, why bring in December? Try to keep up.

I don’t pay for pivotal so I can’t see the EPS snow map, but the mean snow depth peaks at 0.2”. That’s absolutely insane for the first half of February.

And the ensemble mean is just as bad. Less than an inch over 16 days.

To your point, here’s today’s 12z GFS snow map for the entire run east of the Rockies. Can it be any more brutal for the heart of winter?

March 2022 had that storm that dropped like 9” overnight on a weekend and it was well into the 60s by midweek, then I think a smaller event very late in the month, followed by a 36 hour period where we went from a low of 14 one morning to a high of 76 the next day. It was one of those rare Marches where we got lots of snow despite it being decisively above normal temperature-wise on the whole.

Yeah, now no one east of the Rockies is winning (except maybe outliers like Buffalo and Minneapolis last winter), but that’s almost worse because it gives little signs of hope.

Latest GFS suggests we never see the troughing and instead get a portion of the ridge. An above normal period in that Feb 1-5 timeframe suddenly seems alive and well again. This is comical. Another embarrassing model fail less than 6 days out.

It’s going to be an uphill climb to even get this winter into the category of “pretty bad but not abysmal” like a 2016-17 or a 2018-19 as opposed to a 2019-20 or a 2022-23.

Well we already lost the snow for next weekend, but now it seems we’ve lost the cold too. Even the “cold” part of the pattern is warm and dry.

Personally I’m not sure a January with 6” of precip falling primarily in the form of rain is much more preferable to a January with 6” of precip falling primarily in the form of cat piss, the most vile substance discovered to date.

What was the predominant p-type in those three Januaries? What has been the predominant p-type in this one?

Actually even more than that. We’re already at +3.9. Looking at the forecast to close out the month, could be +4.2 or 4.3.

Oof. If that’s where we are as of 2/14, and even if it quickly reverses after that, there are 4, maybe 5 at most, weeks left where snow would be viable.

It seems we’re running out of time yet again. Looks warm after the suppressed storm next week and it’ll be mid February before anything could even possibly flip, which is still not a guarantee. The past, present, and future weather at this juncture is, indeed, soul crushing.

Remarkably, the majority of that January 1978 precip fell as snow. 6.25” of precip and 40.2” of snow that month, for the snowiest January and 3rd snowiest month on record. Also looks like we’ve set yet another daily precip record, our 3rd since Christmas. With 150+ years of records, we’d be expected to get less than 3 of those per year, and now we’ve had 3 in about a month.

I know it’s just the Canadian, but LOL. 982mb low in a great spot in early Feb and the entire precip shield is rain.

November 1950 and other similar storms also had tremendous amounts of cold air that they were able to tap into, so they didn’t result in two days of snow with temperatures hovering at or just above freezing.