Bob Chill

Gfs doesn't look much different in the upper levels than the icon @ hr120. Should be a better run. Still an eternity away. Just need the building ridge out west to play nice

@Ji did you look at the 12z euro control? It actually looks just like the gfs with troughs carving, multiple snow events (3), and the best (relatively speaking) entrenched cold towards the end of the run since the first half of Dec. I don't have any strong feelings either way for Feb. I will say that it doesn't look hostile yet. Maybe even a little encouraging...

Half decent +pna driven pattern showing up near the end of Jan into Feb. It's a process and may not yield immediate results but it's no doubt far better than where we've been since mid Dec. A +pna driven pattern in Feb can actually produce without a -ao/nao. CFS/CanSips/euro weeklies all imply a +pna of various magnitudes for the balance of Feb. PSU covered this in great detail this year already but if you look at all the 5"+ storms in Feb with a +ao/nao nearly every one is +pna driven. ETA: considering how this winter has gone start to finish I'm expecting the good looks to deteriorate as we move forward. However, the gfs started showing cold amplification in fantasyland a couple days ago and hasn't wavered since. That + the ens generally agreeing carries some weight. One decent warning level storm and it would erase quite a bit of the nonstop gut punches over the last 6 weeks.

The only real flaw since mid Dec is we can't buy a deep/cold airmass to save our lives. Precip has been plentiful and some of these west tracks could have been decent mixed events. The long range through all of Jan has been too cold. Until that changes our luck is unlikely to change. I'm not punting the rest of winter because that's silly. Winter didn't even begin in 2015 until mid Feb and ended up being a great winter. It all started with that arctic front. Anything can happen and nobody knows how Feb will go. Personally, I'm not getting invested anymore until a cold pattern is either in place or knocking on the door.

Lol- yea, and i was so confident in it that I said it would be at least Wed before we know if we stand a chance. That was the only error in my post because it only took until Monday night to rule it out. I'm not even looking at ens run for more than 2 minutes now. It's not even worth that much time. Maybe mid Feb gets better. I'm ready for spring, fishing, and camping now. I'm done with this year unless something believable gets inside of 5 days.

The only way we pull this off is if the upper and mid level lows stay south and then pass east. Overhead or nearby or anywhere west at our latitude is a complete fail. I'll reserve my excitement for when all ops agree on the south then east track

0z was much better. Angle of attack on the primary and transfer was much more favorable. Events like this usually drop some snow even with a west track. With the mids torching in front the only way to get real snow is to be west or nw of the low at all times. 0z was trying to do that. 12z isn't even close

Just like any regional forum... the highest concentration of posters live in the densest population areas and vice versa.

Look at the setup in its entirety. It's an awful set of variables to produce here. Especially along the corridor. Models have never once had any consensus of a path to victory. We're getting exicited over long shot runs that are within the envelope of possibilities but the probability in general is really bad.

Gefs makes a strong case for not much east of I81 and lost the cluster from 6z that showed better chances along 95.

I'll say this... if my yard is pounding rain while 20 miles west is pounding fatties next weekend I may go off the rails in epic style

It's looking like a SS shortwave is going to track across the deep south. Basically universal agreement for long leads. That's encouraging. The hard part is the northern stream. We have to have some sore of respectable hp tracking above it. Any type of weakness in the NS and there will be no cold and a west track. Won't really know how that breaks until later this week

It's much more like a mid march storm than Jan. Slow rolling cutoff under a big upper level ridge is a spring pattern.

Eps still has it but increased the spread instead of tightening. I could be looking past an event this weekend though. It's as dicey as they come and my gut says absolutely no way but I'm rooting bigly to bust huge.

Check out some of these analogs... there were some big storms in 83 and 61. 1960 had a big snow that hit Houston to Cleveland. Jan 2000 is almost in there too. Lol

I'm not a pessimist about next weekend... just a realist. Lol 12z eps actually made me a little optimistic. Getting a Miller A or clean coastal would fix a lot of things around here. Very early stages of discussing it and obviously the odds are against us but coastals like this can get picked up at long leads much better than anything northern stream driven. By Wed we'll know if it's legit or a phantom.

18z eps goes out to 144. You won't like it. Worse than 12z

@Ji how about this one?

@ji This is d11. Tell me this is not at least intriguing.

It's the first time I've seen some sort of agreement for a specific window in a looooong time. EPS can be pretty good at picking miller A's at long range. We all know d10+ is unstable AF. We'll see how it evolves over the next 5 days. Miller As can be long tracked. We just don't get them often enough to remember anything about them. Not saying I believe a damn thing but what else are we going to do? Track a storm with roasting 850 temps and stale rotten air that wasn't even cold to begin with?

OKV has 8 members showing more than 2". Half of those support the op.

I just check the eps control... it actually has the storm. Comes right out of the SW and bumps against confluence/sprawling hp to the north. EPS is onto something me thinks. Hopefully in 5 days it becomes real.

I did see something encouraging on the EPS. Some sort of system ejects out of the SW with a decent track. It's a long ways out and could be a blip but this is the most active cluster d10+ I've seen in a week. Seeing the agreement on timing is a step above a random shotgun blast with nothing specific. EPS is seeing a discrete event from the distance. This weekend is very low probability. Practically zero imho. Loop the 850 temp panels on the gfs and euro and be honest with yourself... there is no cold air all the way to the Canadian border out in front and the air behind the system is above normal. Is this really a snow setup?

I remember a few storms that were modeled rain that snowed but extremely rare. Pd2 and late feb 2015( the west track storm) come to mind. Jan 2011 trafficgeddon too The real flaw this winter is a total lack of deep cold airmasses. We've had zero since mid Dec. A week ago ens really teased us with deep cold. It's just not happening for any reason so far. For the next 3 weeks we really only need "normal cold" and even that is challenging it seems.

It happens sometimes but we can never escape the reality that 80-90% of our winter precip is rain on average going back 100s of years. The odds of a good trend are 10% and a bad trend is 90%. There's a very clear statistical reason that the vast majority of our events trend the wrong way