Stormchaserchuck1

Nice.. I hadn't had a snowstorm over 5.5" here until this Winter. Your Hudson bay/Baffin island block is +300-350dm. Pacific pattern is a little bit further west. Our biggest storms actually happen in a gulf of alaska low, so it's really a fragile difference, where exactly that pacific pattern is.

Actually what's next is <5000dm over Alaska, which is worse. Then a stronger -PNA evolves after that.. it gets progressively warmer and warmer, but the pattern change to tip us over freezing line is happening in the next few days.

I think a uniform +PNA works just as good. Maybe in El Nino +PNA won't be as cold, but lately we've had some good opposite examples of -pna. It's just more uniform these days, on both sides, than a long time ago for whatever reason. I don't think it's a global warming issue besides some minor things

It's already flipping the script at Hr36

Positive PNA is working, look at how cold January was. And Jan 2025 in +PNA there was 10" of snow in Florida.. our deep freeze we just had and are still experiencing is heavily +pna driven! Now in the next few days the Pacific does a fast pattern flip.

I've never seen a +450dm N. Pacific High and negative heights in Alaska and snow!

PNA has highest correlation with our temps in January (0.40 correlation) and February (0.35 correlation). It has a 0.15 correlation in December and March.

Well yeah, there are 6 main patterns: 1. WPO 2. EPO 3. Gulf of Alaska 4. PNA 5. NW-based NAO (Could call it AO) 6. south-based NAO Most impactful to our temps is EPO.

I don't know why, but the PNA is more uniform now than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. 3-wave patterns that almost always carry through. I get this from tracking just about every Winter since 2017. I've said it before, storms that models have snow around Day 7-8 with a strong -PNA or +EPO end up rain >90% of the time. Maybe the jet stream is north, maybe it's something with the AMO, but I don't see this storm threat as a close call at all. And I know as we get closer it will trend toward more of a snow miss and rain or nothing. Now if we end up 30 degrees and sunny on that day, I will say you were right - the SE ridge was not underestimated, but that's a strong anomaly in the Pacific! It's not just PNA, it's like 3 standard deviations. In March we get more neutral heights with -PNA but in Feb the SE ridge correlation is still pretty strong: [default of map below is positive, so negative pna is opposite]

If you plot N. Pacific ridges most extreme, in that spot, there is a Day-0 effect. I've done it before, gone through the whole dataset and made custom indexes. There is a Day-0 correlation. It's strongest 2-3 days later, but there are rising heights in the SE right as the N. Pacific ridge starts setting up. Plot it sometime. Either way though, the PNA is going negative in the next few days.

We have -PNA 3-4 days before that, it's not +450dm, but there is a ridge with trough over top. You see this starting to effect us in the next few days, as we warm up to 40s in +EPO. After that, I'm going to say there isn't any cold air reinforcement, it's not actually 1-2-3 with WC trough either, sometimes you will have a SE ridge without the 2nd part, but either way there is WC trough to some extent after 1st part of PNA establishes. It's just not a good pacific pattern man. It's not because of "our luck and global warming", it's a really easily identifiable pattern anomaly in the pacific.

2000 Ravens had a shoutout in the Super Bowl if it wasn't for a kick return, Ray Lewis was SB MVP.

^Make a composite of +450dm N. Pacific ridge days south of the Aleutians now-time in Feb, and tell me what heights in the Mid Atlantic and SE look like. I'll give you hint, they are warmer than average. The Pac pattern change is happening in the next few days with Polar Vortex temporarily setting up over Alaska. Then it transitions to southern High pressure.. but the whole pattern -PNA/+EPO is setting up early enough to skew that storm warm, and I think by a good margin.

Yeah, it's more about disqualifying a theory than proving something new.

^Much, much different Pacific. Just consider that medium range models don't fully factor in the downstream pattern of PNA. I've seen too many times over the years. This was an easy one, +450dm N. Pacific ridge. Your composite doesn't have a +450dm N. Pacific ridge lol. I don't really care about what happens with the storm - whether it's here or there, but it probably will be in the 40s that day because that's the longwave pattern, starting much earlier.

It looks almost exactly like the classic El Nino composite. I have, throughout this Winter though often had the thought that 2 colder Winters followed by an El Nino might mean that El Nino next year goes colder, but the climate data says about average.

If anyone is curious, 2 colder than average Winters in the Northeast (DJF 24-25 and 25-26) followed by an El Nino is actually a common occurrence.. It has happened 10 times since 1950. Here's the temp composite for the following El Nino Winter (theory for 26-27): I was actually a little surprised that it didn't skew a little cooler. Precip is also surprisingly a little below average in the Mid-Atlantic, with only 10 examples hard to say if that's a coincidence or the pattern continued forward.

If anyone is curious, 2 colder than average Winters in the Northeast (DJF 24-25 and 25-26) followed by an El Nino is actually a common occurrence.. It has happened 10 times since 1950. Here's the temp composite for the following El Nino Winter (theory for 26-27): I was actually a little surprised that it didn't skew a little cooler. Precip is also surprisingly below average in the Mid-Atlantic, with only 10 examples hard to say if that's a coincidence or the pattern.

Thanks all. I didn't make a point whether the storm would happen or not, just that the SE ridge was being underestimated, given the Pacific pattern and the extreme nature of it vs what was happening downstream. Sometimes when a ridge corrects, the northern stream energy will get sheared out and there is no storm, or it's delayed a few days. If the storm date ends up being 40s and sunny, I think that's a win.

Long range 12z EPS today brings cold back the last week of Feb

The -AO trough is lifting out, as the Polar Vortex places over Alaska at Days 3-5, flushing out the cold and warming up the US pattern. Then the N. Pacific High starts building and establishing. At that point we are already in the Upper 30s, with no cold air reinforcement: The -NAO/-AO is weakening and lifting out. The N. Pacific ridge then gets very strong, a >5820dm block. That does overwhelm weak things in February where the wavelengths are longer. Of course, the further along we go, the warmer it gets.

Yeah, the further out in time we go the lower the chance we have with that pattern establishing and flexing.

I think so.

I would do another LES chase sometime. Would you?

The original thought was that we were coming out of deep -AO, rising back to neutral, so this could be the big storm. But the Pacific pattern is entering an extreme, and a now projected +450dm -PNA north Pacific High pressure is going to in trend, squash that EC trough, to at least make it warm enough to rain imo. The NAO ridge is right over top, so when the Pacific pattern changes it sometimes take 3 days to impact us downstream, this one is part of the now-time pattern, with a trough perhaps sticking beneath upper latitude ridging. The GEFS has basically brought the NAO to neutral, as you pointed out and the EPS is weakly negative. At this range the ensemble guidance and big picture pattern is the way to go.