Bob Chill

I'm going into semi retirement here once post HS education is paid for with my next 2. I'll be 56-58 so not ancient. I'm pretty cheap and I work hard AF. I accidently saved enough to call it quits with the rat race as long as cost of living is low. There is no comparison down south. Prop taxes on 30 acres and a 2500sf house are sub $2k. Virginia will have almost no income taxes against us either. Very exciting prospect. My back yard already looks like the country. 2 fire pit areas. We grow food all over in raised beds. Fruit being planted this spring. Stone paths in my "lol woods". Giant wood pile I split by hand. If I can do this on a 3rd of an acre, lord help my back with 30 Eta: maths for reference. I currently pay over $12k/yr for prop taxes, home insurance, and car insurance. Insane. In Southern VA it will prob be 3k tops. Maybe 4. Just one example. You only need a mountain of money to retire in popular cities. You can live a beautiful life on basically a shoestring just a few hour drive away.

I always wondered if you jumped on Blue Ball Road off 95 in NMD and headed south, would you eventually end up on Morningwood Drive in Olney?

Air is damn cold for our area so pretty dense dome to push out of here. More often than not, surface hangs longer than expected in these setups. Nothing can stop the 850mb push tho.

If you put your really big weenie hat on you can draw some very slight similarities to the 2014 all snow west track. Might have been 2015. Worst track and high placement ever for an all snow event. There's a chance

This is why it's always best to wait until approach before jumping on Nam thermals when they diverge. Meso models can go off on tangents due to their intense resolution. Now that the storm actually has a good circulation, we'll see mesos hone in on the mids.

Just for fun. Some long times here know my wife and I are getting out of Rockville in the next 5 years or so. We've been looking at many many options in all directions. Ji prob remembers Kerr Lake and Gaston talk from a year or 2 ago. That has evolved and we're focus exclusively on the entire general area around Smith Mountain Lake. Leesville Lake too. Possibly the other side of the blue ridge near 81 but that's prob going to be it. Looking at 30 acres or so with a semi-self sufficient "compound". So not leaving the area entirely, probably. Quite a mental journey figuring out this move. Far far far more options than when we bought our Rockville house. And I'm very very thankful for Rockville real estate. Allows us to "downsize" considerably and still get everything reasonable we want. Just need to live long enough now...

I'm just happy for Transco Village. They had an unfair and rough go for a while. Especially the 70s, 80s, and 90s. They can finally just be Transco Village and not give a single F anymore. Long time coming man

So a road trip could be Kentuck into Pleasant Gap followed by Tightsqueeze and then Climax. Just stay TF out of Lumpkin Forest with your Kentuck and all is good.

The town of Climax thrives because of the town of Tightsqueeze. A synergy of sorts

Too bad our problems have little to do with the surface low. Let me know when the upper level low ends up south and east about 150 miles from guidance

We'll get some more snow imo. Not even thinking about that going away. All guidance is wintry in general for as far as you can see. Not optimal but pretty good. I just hope expectations aren't thru the roof. It's still mostly a northern stream pattern and rather progressive. A bit of a WAR showing up. Fast movers unless cutoff. Strong systems need luck to not cut. Personally, active winter periods are much much much more fun for me than a 10 day big Miller A track. I like variety in this hobby too. Feeling optimistic for more snow just not great for a big coastal here without random chaos putting pieces in place at just the right time. No long tracks in our future me thinks.

I made a typo in my op and went back and fixed it. It is uncommon in winter with an upper level setup like this to have the low stack and start occluding so early. Which can still easily work for a big storm with a clean offshore track. That's not what we have here due to that stupid hallway of weakness tracking NW of the upper low. It what it is. Ultimately, we just want Feb 2010 type storms. Capture and stack just off shore near or just south of our latitude. Those types of storms never stop snowing and the finale is usually heavy high ratio stuff as things crank in the upper levels 9ver the gulf stream. We can also do well with an upper level "trailer" type progression. Jan 2011 and Feb 2014 are perfect examples. Lull in between sucks but it's still a 1-2 punch. Those progressions often smoke the NE big time because they catch the climax during the capture phase. Once a storm stacks, it's done getting stronger. It marks the beginning of the weakening process. Occlusion is well along in the weakening process. Basically, whomever is due west or NW when the upper and mid level lows move over top of the surface low will be smiling ear to ear for many hours Eta: no matter what the progression is, generally speaking you want all 3 to pass south and east of us. We can survive the upper low passing over or west on a slanted system if the surface and mid level lows draw in cold air (banana highs are so dman important because of this). We can sometimes survive an 850 low passing west or overhead. Surface low? Lol. We survived one in 2014 but that shocked basically everyone.

That low jump is just a digital thing from what I can tell. Model graphic output is programmed to stamp an L at the lowest pressure but the lowest pressure is fluid so the L jumps around inside the "bag of low pressure". I like using the shaded mslp anomaly maps to just compare the bigger bag (general center) and not the L (specific center). I could be wrong here so someone correct me if so

I think a lot of the unwillingness to accept the outcome stems from not understanding how low pressure systems evolve. There isn't just a surface low like everyone looks at on TT. There are also mid and upper level lows. At our latitude in the winters, it's uncommon to have all 3 on top of each other like this south of us. They are usually "slanted" with the surface first and upper last. When you get all 3 spinning together right over top of each other and no cold high feeding the beast,, you better be far NW from the center or you're in big wet trouble.

It does in comparison to other closed lows approaching from the south with cold around. But there's a fundamental difference here... the storm has basically fully matured well south of our latitude. We can get smoked during the maturation process and then get a second serving with the upper level low but the process of getting there is not what we're seeing at all. Because the storm is stacked without any kind of cold feed,, it's a literal warm air vacuum and circulator near the stacked low center. When these types of events develop further north, the stacking process usually happens offshore and to our NE. Then SNE gets literally blizzardeded after we already got a big event. From a good snowstorm comparison, this particular storm is really really screwed up compared to others and the idea was clear as day nearly 4 days ago. Dems the breaks man. Stuff happens.

Sim sat doesn't look much like a snowstorm at all. Cuban express

NAM prob has the right idea but I'm not locking into anything in the mid levels until the storm is on approach. At least them it will be a developed system with real time data of the layers inside. Never doubted a mix/mess. Would be a bummer to get such a hard core push of WWA into an OK airmass only to get sand blasted and washed away without covering the grass first.

The storm has been pretty much the same for 5+ straight days. The "tracking" part was mostly us finding a way to get some snow out of a storm with serious temp problems. Far from a fail since the storm is still happening and looks to be about the same as it has.

Reach arounds have happy endings, sometimes

Icon also absolutely sucks at warm noses/mid levels too. And this is the wrong storm by a million miles to be weak in that dept

Exactly. While this storm has some unique and interesting features, it's still a very typical setup and outcome for the track. Prob 50% or more (stat guys can check) of all our measurable snowfalls are mixed around the cities and burbs. We do it often and at times we do it really well. If climo really takes over, not much above freezing rain is going to fall. I've been thinking that's how it's going to play out but models had too much spread to discuss.

A bunch of people have said this but with the track and vigor of this low, there is no stopping a mid level destruction from rushing in anywhere near or east of the low. Unforgiving setup in the mids. My 3-4" call for my yard is predicated on 2-3 hours of mod/hvy snowfall tops before other, less enjoyable stuff happens. I may not get that much but it is the heart of cold season and conditions leading in are good. We'll see

Ops appear to have done nice job on this one from a pretty good range imo. The general idea hasn't wavered for a few days and if you think about it, ensembles made it harder to forecast. Ensembles didn't do all that great at their most useful range. Pretty unusual the way it's played out so far. Only call: 3-4" IMBY

I can't think of a time when the euro gust panels were accurate for any kind of storm. Never checked gfs. Euro always seemed way overdone. I started looking at wind a different way and got much better at predicting. Look at your sustained surface winds instead of gusts. Then add 10-15mph to that for "gusts". Check 925s and see how quick it's ripping just off the deck and make adjustments in your head. Generally speaking, I95 & west really doesn't get big wind gusts without a westerly component. Maybe it's topography. My yard or neighborhood gets little if any wind damage when there's an easterly component.

I was initially thinking ops may be out of whack because the uncommon solution in the face of "ok" upper levels kept ending up inland no matter what timing difference or 500mb shift. That tells us something in the "steering" is pretty stable. Then it became more clear to me. Track has far more to do with that hallway of weakness than anything that happens before with the storm itself. This has prob been rehashed a bunch. Haven't been reading much.