78Blizzard

You mean this prediction isn't coming true?

CMC holding to its cutter.

It's not.

Major ice storm for NNE.

Nice thump from the first system.

Digging much less this time, too.

The trough out west seems more positive tilted than at 18z.

They can't go any further west.

Actually, not that good for them either with lots of taint.

Yeah, just north of Minnesota. But not as strong, around 1050 mb.

We need it dropping into Minnesota or the upper lakes.

I'll keep that in mind the next time I see someone claiming a great pattern is shaping up for the period..........

As the peeps anxiously await the 18z GFS to keep their hopes alive for a grinch-free Christmas.

I'm convinced that Hunga Tonga has something to do with this.

I know the feeling. I started mine up on Tuesday to make sure it was ready for the season, and in the back of my mind was wondering if I jinxed it.

It seems to almost always fail when we start a thread at 8 days out. I remember when James did it and people lambasted him for that.

In the case of today's system, the GFS was the outlier ots and finally caved to the others on d6. So if it follows the same pattern, we should expect it to cave soon.

Thanks for the input. I agree with you. So basically all these vendor snow maps are all somewhat useless not knowing their coding.

Wrong. You're misinterpreting what I said. Using your example in what I said, the GEFS mean would have shown an slp that would have indicated by its lower and upper level metrics clearly a rain situation, and the mean snow would be zero. As I said, it should all be based on what emanates from the placement of the mean slp.

I don't get that. If the temps and qpf are means of all members, then so is the snow a mean of all members. If the mean temps for an area are low to mid 20's, and upper level means are well below freezing for the same area, shouldn't the mean snow for that area correspond with those indicators? Otherwise, it would appear that the cutting members are skewing the snow totals. The placement of the low on the GEFS is also a mean, and the resulting metrics should be based on that. I think the problem with most of the ensemble models is that they take a mean of the snow totals of all members (including the cutters showing little or zero) and plug that into their maps, when in reality the maps should be reflecting the snow resulting from the placing of the mean slp and resultant lower and upper level means. The storm vista maps appear to take the latter approach with the GEFS.

We've seen a lot of both of those scenarios in the last few years, but if push comes to shove I'll go with the chasing convection east.

Those Weather Bell maps are underdone. If you compute the total GEFS qpf for the storm it becomes obvious, especially in areas that stay in the 20's throughout the storm. That area NW of Worcester to S NH shows 6.6-6.7 in their snow map, yet total qpf shows an average around 1.25". Temps there are in the low to mid 20's, and the upper levels are all quite cold. I used the Pivotal maps for the qpf and temps, but their maps have the snowfall totals underdone as well on the GEFS.

Those two members out near Bermuda are keeping this mean over the benchmark instead of a hugger at best.

If that's all we end up with, I'll take it at this point vs the previous alternative.