Layman

Are helmets required PPE at resorts nowadays or just a smart decision to keep the semi-important grey matter in tact? It's been many years since we've been snowboarding and are planning on taking the kids this year while seeing if taking a break for half our lives has had any impact on our abilities...

Totally embracing it here and will definitely be cooking out within the next 72 hours. Whether winter happens or not is out of my control and lemonade will be made regardless. My wood stove will enjoy the reprieve until it gets cold again. The kids however....probably going to want the warmth to hang around a bit to enjoy their Christmas gifts.

What a neat shot from one of the Wildcat cams this morning:

Wow - incredible damage up there.

15.3 (AKA "near 30")

For those who work at the resorts and/or have knowledge of mountain ops, what kind of info is there regarding snowmaking? Specifically, are there known ratios for how much snow can be made, and/or ground covered at certain temperatures, water content and air pressure? For example, if there's a super stable airmass at 20 degrees F for 24 hours, can it be reasonably precisely calculated how much ground can be covered at X inches of depth?

You serious, Clark?

Beautiful morning on top of Mt. Washington judging by the cam. Not much snow still.

Don't overthink it. Kill two birds with one stone and enjoy your trip!

From this, to this in a mere 72 hours

Wolfie's From Mars, George Is From Venus

Damage?

I was checking all the local cams earlier and everybody seems to be working hard with guns blazing trying to rebuild. Except Wildcat, oddly. They were the only ones with no apparent signs of snowmaking. The NH resorts seemed to be making good progress. The Sunday River conditions report sounded rough. Definitely recovering from a traumatic experience. One of my kids was up at Gunstock yesterday (first time ever) and was able to have fun on a few trails learning to snowboard. Hopefully the cold over the next couple days allows everyone to claw back some ground and prep for whatever comes next.

Imagine what the Venusian ski industry was like before the collapse. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/12/venus-was-like-earth-until-climate-change-uninhabitable/

Now that this one is in the books, I'm curious what the consensus is for @Damage In Tolland's take on this storm. There were some high fives and "atta boy's" yesterday but was this a case of keen interpretation of model output, wish-casting, persistence forecasting or some combination of all these things? Hindsight is always 20/20 but it's hard telling, for me anyways, if someone has truly sniffed something out ahead of time or just gets lucky. He was definitely onto this and stuck to that going into go-time whereas it seemed like many (who I tended to agree with, especially due to the storm the week prior...) were on the side of this not being too impactful. Just curious what some pertinent bullet points are for an after storm review from those with experience doing this. What was interpreted accurately and what wasn't? What did DIT see ahead of time to say this is actually going to happen? How often do those variables show up and it DOESN'T happen?

That's a great idea and sounds like it would be a valuable tool. You guys should do that here. Maybe us regular folk could get a pool together and bet on our favorite forecasters...? Every 3-4 days a new round gets going and a new pot is available for wagering. Something to think about

Rain really came down for a few minutes here. This was impressive:

Neighbors just got gifted our kids trampoline. Merry Christmas!

It got real quiet here earlier but has noticeably picked up again within the past 15-20 minutes. Took a spin out of my road and had to drive around a few bigger branches. Nothing too crazy or out of the ordinary for this kind of storm but the sound of the winds up high make it seem like it's something different. Power remains on but had a few hard flickers and heard a boom down the road where Eversource reports an outage.

I understand what you're saying but find much irony in these statements. My interpretation of science is different. When the gate comes down and the debate is forced to stop, I certainly question what's going on. Understandably that may not apply 100% here as the focus is on evaluating forecasting technique specifically. If the current state of anything being observed scientifically can't be debated, it would appear to me actual, proper science is simply not being employed.

I might be in the minority on this but I've always understood science to be just that - not "good" or "bad". If you're following the scientific method then the results are simply what they are. To that end, what passes as "science" these days in every realm strikes me as anything but, so that subjective "good" and "bad" is determined by the interpreter of the data and how it fits their personal biases. Actual, unadulterated, unbiased, non-incentivized science should stand on its own. Good luck finding it.

Curious to hear how it goes a few miles closer to the coast. Getting some strong gusts on this side of the bay with a moderate sized pine branch down in the yard. I'm assuming you'll see higher wind gusts in Portsmouth.