Bob Chill

I'm not throwing in the towel. It's entirely possible Feb is a very good month. For the time being I'm focusing on other things though. If something real shows up I'll be right back at it. If nothing shows up I'll look forward to early spring and all the fun stuff that comes with it. From a hobbyist perspective this has been an exceptionally lame year. Hardly abnormal around here

A good portion of what made those runs weenieish was today's storm. Lol. It was the only storm that had decent consensus. At one point over 50% of the eps members has 2" or more of snowfall. Beyond that was shotgun style. Those panels looked great from a distance but I realized today that shoveling rain sucks. I'm actually disinterested in long range now. Winter has shown its hand... the struggle is real

There were 2-3 days of good runs before guidance latched onto the canadian ridge then the wheels came off. The good runs were off and on iirc. Some looked good and others looked so so at best. They looked their best when today's storm looked like it would produce. Other than that member solutions were mostly shotgun style and not keying in on a specific event. I was too busy to look much this past week but every quick scan from Tues onwards looked progressively worse. Today is the lowest low. Lol

It really depends on what you're using them for. Verbatim and setting specific expectations is crazy. However, they are an excellent tool with probabilities. Especially when there is a disconnect. When the ens mean h5 looks ripe but member solutions aren't showing much it provides valuable insight that there are some issues that the mean is smoothing over Ens mean h5 panels are obviously the most important of any long range panel. They provide evidence of a decent/snowable pattern potential or evidence that snow is very unlikely. I like to check under the hood of ens mean and snow meteos are the clearest and most concise chart you can get that info from. Nobody is going to like this post but here's the 12z eps snow meteo for the metar closest to my house. It looks downright depressing for primo climo. You can immediately see that odds are close nil through the end of the month. When you have ops and ens showing almost no snowfall over the next 10 days it's often a reliable and accurate indicator to not expect much. Even d10-15 looks horrible and the gefs is actually worse... lol One thing that kept bugging me a week ago when things looked more promising was the lack of any kind of signal that snowfall odds were above normal. There were a few days that looked pretty good but on the balance it looked pretty bad and here we are... staring at a 10 day period with little to no chance. I'm not doubting the eps or gefs snow output right now. Even when they are loaded with potential chances it still takes a good bit of luck to line things up. When they agree like this that any meaningful snowfall is unlikely it's not something you can ignore.

Lol what do you see in February? Just general ideas of a having a -epo and/or +pna more often than the opposite. It's unusual how things are failing over the next week. Ens almost got it right but the Canadian ridge is in the way of getting deep cold int the mid latitudes. I saw a cluster of ens members showing warmish/rainish potential a week ago but it was a minority and the clear majority said amplified and cold was likely. Go figure... the minority fail solutions are right this time when the majority has been winning over the last month. It's like a hex... Feb just looks ok imo. Nothing discrete or specific. Just that we could get a couple breaks for the first time all winter

Anything is possible during prime climo but it's not looking good until Feb from what I see. No blocking, no deep cold, and an overall lame h5 pattern for the next 10 days is all I see. If something pops in the mid range it will grab my attention but I'm pretty much uninterested. Tired of chasing ghosts in a stacked against pattern

Snowing in rockville. I'll shelter in place for now

Feb 15 squall was like that for 9.5 minutes

I've scanned models last few days but haven't taken a close look until just now. Long range is suckin. Lol. No way to sugarcoat. Maybe we can squeeze something in this month but it's sure not going to come easy. Unless things trend better quickly, I'm not seeing much of a chance until the last couple days of the month. Things trended from pretty good to pretty bad in 5 days so maybe in 5 days it looks good again

Bingo. Getting crushed this week. I've passed the torch until further notice. As much as I like snow... I like making money better...

The trouble is above 850. Use soundings and look at the 800mb level. Warm nose isn't strong but it's there. We can get lots of sleet with 850s below zero

0z NAM and ICON are almost identical with temps/qpf through 0z Sun. Temps aren't even iffy over a large area. That's not common with storms like this. Might be a red flag. Gfs is almost 10 degrees warmer but gfs is bad with CAD

Nothing will top the Feb 07 sleetstorm that turned into a glacier. My friend was an xray tech and she worked two 18 hour days from slips and sled accidents. Lol ICON is .5 qpf all frozen. I'm sure some is sleet. Models agree most of the area is below freezing for most of the precip. Mid 20s the night before will freeze the ground. Could be an interesting storm for not much snow

Deform Porn starring Highratio Rippage

Extrapolating ensembles is a sure sign winter is a raging dumpster fire.

Haven't seen many good h5 setups lately. This is a really good one. Keep em coming

Scratch my last post. All in 18z gfs.

Been busy AF last few days and haven't really looked at anything in detail. @psuhoffman covered everything but I wanted to post something about the d10 window. Seems crazy that odds favor rain but they do for now so it is what it is. The 12z EPS qpf and snow meteos show just how low our odds are for now. This can change in a blink as it's far out there in time. Some of the rain solutions are surely ice but snowfall is meager considering near unanimous support for precip. QPF Snowfall This comparison will be something I'm watching closely this week. Especially after the 18z gfs showed a path to victory

Following the op but it was an incremental run over run improvement. 18z was friendly. No big shifts or anything but the bleeding stopped... for now

18z euro is souther/colder. Small change but every inch makes a diference in these parts. Run ends at hr90 so don't know if it made any difference.

Radar is an instantaneous snapshot of precipitation. The MSLP panel includes 6 hours of precip

Gfs finally has a more classic setup. That's the good news. Bad news is it's 13 days away and will be gone in 6 hours.

Exactly right. A northern stream shortwave/low draws mild air on return flow. Thing is... models can't get the NS right 3-5 days in advance. Last thing I'm worried about on fantasy op panels is a NS shortwave. It may end up happening but no f'n way the gfs just "figured it out"

Dec 09 was in doubt all the way to hr72 and even then there was plenty of doubt. The second Feb storm was similar. However, first Feb was a long distance telegraphing as was Jan 16. Those 2 storms are the longest lead big dogs I've ever seen.

Unfortunately it's pretty common until inside of 72 hours. The vast majority of our events aren't figured out until inside of 3 days.