George001

Update: it’s mid April and the cold is nowhere to be found, my area is expected to be 80 the next 3 days. I’m planning to install my AC tonight. Just a month and a half ago I was buried under feet of snow, kind of nuts how quick the seasonal transition was this year. Very warm start to spring.

I do agree that northern areas aren’t necessarily doomed even if the Nino is on the stronger side, especially the great lakes (I know you guys do better in La Nina’s, but I do remember seeing somewhere that a super Nino is less of a death sentence for you guys than my area. I’d still prefer a weak or moderate event, but the early signs are this is developing more like recent strong or super ninos than the weak/moderate bucket. If it does become a super Nino I would go fairly aggressive on the mild and less snow side, but not necessarily if it is strong but not super and the non ENSO indicators look good (like you mentioned this is key, and is why this past winter was such a good one). Even last winter wasn’t an optimal ENSO configuration, and still was the best winter I had since 2014-2015. The east based nina idea like 17-18 and 21-22 didnt pan out, it shifted from more basin wide to a modoki Nina in the second half of winter. I recall looking in late Jan and being surprised at how much the coldest anomalies shifted west. We will see how things play out, id roll the dice with an 09-10 ENSO configuration with less blocking, so hopefully things break right in that regard.

It’s still too early to know for sure how strong the El Niño will be but the early signs do favor an event that gets fairly powerful. How strong is uncertain, but he’s right that if it does become a super event that would be very bad news for northern areas.

Yep. A super Nino is possible but we don’t know what is going to happen. A moderate or strong event is possible as well.

Agree. Still a wide range of possibilities given we are in early spring, but gun to head given the current subsurface im thinking it probably won’t be a weak event. Still, huge difference between say a moderate and a super Nino.

Hopefully we go the 02-03 route instead of a 15-16 redux.

I’m not expecting it to come back, but I hope I’m wrong and we get snow into April.

Looks like we may have one more brief window and then that’s it, but it would be more of an early spring storm than a return to winter. Seems like a long shot. Regardless, we had a great run, easily the best winter since 2014-2015. Easily an A winter in my book.

I hope we can avoid big warmth, im planning to buy a rest of season ski pass for Wachusett and would like to ski into mid April.

Yep, runs away like a coward. So much arrogance just to be this wrong.

We were supposed to get nothing 4 days ago, therefore I would have been happy even if we only got say 6 inches. Im not sure how much snow there is now due to all the drifting, but it’s easily over 20 inches just eyeballing it. This is the best winter we have had since 2015 and I’m enjoying every second of it.

I just went back outside to measure. This is 2-3 inch an hour snow.

Just woke up to 8 inches of snow and whiteout conditions. Holy shit this storm is amazing, with that radar look 2 feet is not out of the question here. There will probably be areas on the south shore that break 30.

Im expecting 18-24 here.

So much for the canonical front loaded Nina Feb

Is this storm a Miller A or B?

Yeah, going to be tricky with the drifting but I’m going to clear the deck every few hours, going to take measurements when I do so.

Im going to set my alarm. This is going to be a historic burial here.

Yeah he looks to be ground zero for this one. He was downplaying this all week and is going to get absolutely buried. It’s been a rough stretch in SE Mass so it’s nice that we had things break right this winter.

A lot of this is over my head as a non met and more of a causal snow weenie (especially in such a complex setup like this) so I would like to learn more about your process. From what I understand you don’t just look at QPF, storm track, 500mb You see the entire system, notice patterns (eg your Miami rule, phase heavy bias in the mid range, teleconnections, anticipating where the correction vector is pointed based on the ensemble clustering etc) and lean on that pattern recognition rather than ripping and reading QPF and kuchera like people do on Twitter. It’s an old school approach similar to another met I follow, Bernie Rayno. We need more of this and less QPF ripping from twitterologists. Feel free to tweak or correct parts of this that are off base. About your game of managing nested anomalies idea, I want to make sure I really understand this right. Would things like an extreme arctic airmass, intense thermal gradient, rapid phase shift for NAO, ENSO mismatch (La Nina surface with El Niño subsurface), etc fall into that category? The arctic airmass isn’t as entrenched as it was in the heart of winter, but a 1050ish mb high diving into the Midwest is no joke. Then we have the SE well AN. What about the role that CC as a whole plays in this idea of nested anomalies? On a global scale we are a pocket of cold in a sea of warmth like you mentioned in an earlier post, I’m curious how that ties into this.

Sort of, I was doing weed and shrooms, now I’m doing shrooms.

Yeah, nothing against drugs (Im sticking to shrooms now) but when it becomes an addiction that’s a problem. I kicked my weed habit a couple of months ago, noticed my attitude and energy levels have improved a lot. Picked the perfect winter to do it.

When it comes to this hobby, this is as good as it gets. It’s snowing out right now and a blizzard is coming on Monday

Casually brushing off 10-15 inches of snow like it’s not that big of a deal and not higher end

If that phases in earlier on the Euro suite, that opens things up for northern areas that are also getting hit by today’s storm.