jwilson

1 for 6 on severe threats thus far. Aside from the other night when it was raining ice cubes, not much to speak of during these events, locally. Mostly outflow winds. There was definitely a tornado in eastern Ohio last night, however. Evident on radar and supposedly there was a brief video.

Tornado Watch to our south. I'm skeptical of anything that severe tonight, but something to keep an eye on if you're out or around the area.

Looks like Ohio is this spring's Tornado Alley. I feel like we tend to get our worst severe weather when it's not forecasted, so maybe this will bust. Something to keep an eye on, however, as TimB noted it's been a decade since we've had a "Moderate" risk locally.

Vernal equinox being tomorrow night, winter will "officially" close.

Interesting to see how next week goes in terms of temps. Strong divergence between Euro and GFS. Former wants us back into the 60s by Tuesday while the GFS likes a more extended period of cooler weather. Looks like March 18th our average highs hit 50 and then 60 by April 9th. Sorry, no snow to speak of so for now the talk is mostly boring unless we can pop some T-storms again.

I think we had more storms over the last couple days than we did all of last summer.

Not much winter to forecast. The ensembles all show a warmer pattern after this coming weekend when we get a cold shot, but it looks like any snow talks are on hold for a while. The GEFS is the exception for now which shows a little possible something on March 2nd when we get a transient ridge in a near ideal position. But it is on its own. The EPS and GEPS are both showing a strong warm look, nearly full latitude ridge at that time. I guess if you roll the pattern forward, mid-March is a possibility for something? Hard to get overly excited at this point. March is always a wild card, of course, but for me it's something historical like 1993 or let's just move on to spring. Five-and-dimes aren't as effective or interesting after February. In December? Sure.

I drove through that death band in the city. 279 from the north was completely covered and I passed one vehicle that had clearly spun around. It was snowing so hard snow was accumulating on my hood while I was driving. Massive dinner plate flakes. Once I got beyond the Liberty tunnel you could see the subsidence. Much worse dendrite growth and 19 in the South Hills was mostly just wet, excepting a few spots. The snow started getting a bit heavier in Bethel beyond Mt. Lebo.

NWS pretty bullish on their call. There is going to be a narrow band of winners somewhere between Allegheny and Morgantown. Problem is if you're outside that maxima band, you're probably dealing with subsidence and bad dendrite growth. Pretty much all the latest mesos keep that band in Greene and Washington counties. It will be interesting to nowcast that and see where it falls. I thought the soundings weren't that great looking into Allegheny even yesterday in terms of maximizing potential, but I don't know how reliable those are from the mesos.

On all the ensembles, there's another Omega block look setting up for next weekend, except with the ridge potentially positioned further west. I had highlighted this period in the past because the ensembles had pretty classic East Coast snowstorm looks before. Now that look is not at all the same, but it could still setup into something interesting. The operationals show nothing but that's irrelevant right now. Remember that the last time that omega block happened, we had a pretty major storm, it just missed us by a few hundred miles and buried other places in feet of snow. It's quite possible this is our last chance before March torches, so I'm going to enjoy tracking this even if it amounts to nothing.

Congrats on the win! We went from rain to snow to heavy snow to mix to flurries to high clouds in the matter of 48 hours out here in Pittsburgh. I'd ask my mom to measure (Hatboro), but I'd prefer she doesn't slip in the conditions.

I was obsessed with the original when I was 10 - went to see it in the theater at least three times and then burned through a VHS copy. A big reason I got into tornadoes and weather was because of that movie. Obviously the science doesn't hold up at all, and I imagine this sequel won't be any better in that regard, but it's a trip.

It does depend a bit on which model you followed. The Canadian and Ukie both picked up on the southern solution earlier, starting Thursday into Friday. Thursday at 0Z was the last run the CMC showed a really amped northern push. The problem is forecasters, myself included, don't put as much stock in those compared to the GFS and Euro, and those two were still showing a bigger spread into Sunday. It's a bad performance, but the GFS has been quite bad this winter, overall. There's always those occasions where certain models score an unexpected win. Back in 2016, for example, even the NAM scored a win, and that's quite rare.

Yep, really a function in the change of the confluence up north. This is from 0Z Saturday when it looked like the storm could have driven north of us. Here you can see the northern stream is pretty flat and not particularly intense (area across Northern Michigan and Wisconsin), while our s/w of relevance is relatively spread and unaffected. And then this is 12Z today. Suddenly you have a bit of a notch developing in the wavelengths (stronger confluence), and it's also pressing down more with less of a West to East, flat orientation. It's exerting more influence, overall. Our area of relevance is more compressed, too, because of those NS changes. Most of the energy is confined to a SE quadrant. Precip shield cannot extend further to the NW away from that vorticity. Manipulating a system like this creates your intense and compact deformation bands, but it limits the AOI of the storm. Enough to generate those crazy gradients. I think part of the problem lately is that NS moving so fast anymore and with it constantly dropping s/w after s/w, we're having more trouble timing things properly. It feels like our only hope is to get the NS to phase in and give us something bigger while hoping we have some kind of block in place to prevent a storm from progressing north unimpeded. It seems we can't just run a developed southern stream event without interference. This is something more akin to Nina behavior, too.

I think this winter has proven to be a humbling experience thus far for weather-oriented folks. Every time you think you're learning and understanding something, the atmosphere turns around and says, "Nah, bro," and kicks you in the nards like a middle school bully. Our understanding of atmospheric physics is clearly still in the novice stage, about as deep as a kiddie pool (relatively speaking). The fact that models continue to struggle this bad is evidence of that. Our weather likely being heavily influenced by things happening in or around the Indian Ocean is the perfect illustration as to why we don't have a firm predictive grasp on global weather patterns. It's the butterfly effect. It's looking more possible the groundhog was right and we can forget this winter happened before too long.