LordBaltimore

Flakes have arrived! The lightest of flurries rn in Columbia

If you wanna be even more envious, by that time cars will be electric and most city buildings will have replaced furnaces with mini-split type heat-pumps so they'll have no UHI to worry about

Nothing yet in Kings Contrivance. Hoping to get a flake or two before this little band moves out

Looks like T-15 mins for first jebwalk in Columbia

Who tf are all these people talking about sleep in the storm thread. Disgraceful. Weenie rule says no sleep if a storm starts before 5am

I had no idea it was even an option for the GFS. That's awesome if it happens

I'm just glad the models don't seem to be backing off the +PNA anytime soon

This will literally be the most difficult thing to shovel most people have seen in years. God help anyone who doesn't put up their wiper blades

If it doesn't get to zero IMBY tuesday morning like the Euro promised for the past 5 days then they should throw that whole model in the trash and start over

fresh, powdery snow has the highest albedo of any surface. Light gets almost completely scattered. Ice and sleet are a bit more translucent if you look at them closely

ice has a slightly lower albedo than snow. I don't believe slight variations in albedo based on snowpack quality are something most models handle, it's usually snow-covered/not snow-covered

I'd imagine besides the depth of freezing layer there's also variability based on if the drops contain ice nucleating particles which then becomes a matter of if they were homogenously nucleated in the first place. Probably no way to tell

somewhere out there the gortons fisherman is about to get his dinghy stuck on a sandbar, covered in freezing spray, blasted by a winter storm, and then capsized by gale force winds

Could see the draw if you're holed up inside. But if I remember right from college there is literally nothing worse than underdressing for a jebwalk stoned

I'm coming around to this event. It's not a big dawg. It's not a cold powder blizzard. But it is a good old fashioned deep winter beat down. Even the best 15+ ratio storms get depressing the next day when they compact. This nasty, sleet hardened mf will be looking the same on Feb 5th that it does early Monday morning just with some extra soot and maybe a few more snowfalls on top

I'm telling you guys, the bay *will* freeze up this year. Maybe not 1977 style but as close as we can get with modern climo. Get ready for bay bridge ice-jam pics Best part is when that happens places near the coast will decouple from their normal water moderated lows

fortran has to be the single most underrated language of all time. It's the perfect mix of low-level enough to do resource management and easy enough to not require someone who is purely a software engineer. And I say this as someone who grew up with python, matlab and c++ lol

I'm exaggerating a little. Obv the model is important, but DA is more important. It was a stupid idea to take on a DA system written in c++ and coded mainly by people outside the field. Most people in this profession are old, they aren't going to learn that shit. And it was effort and money that could've just gone into adding more ensemble members or doing an ensemble of 4dvars like the Euro. But they had to have the shiny object oriented gamer software

The GFS isn't really even a shit model. The model itself is the least important part of prediction. The problem is that years ago everyone decided to take some French guys hair-brained idea and adopt what's unfortunately known as "JEDI" which has become an absolute black hole for man-hours and resources that would otherwise be spent tuning and incrementally improving

2-4 inches of sleet guy knew what's up

Warming up my 6mg wintergreen velo's for the 00Z GFS. Will pair nicely with my gas station disposable mango flavored vape

when I was at UMD for grad school we'd have weekly department meetings and sometimes Louis Uccellini - or as I call him - Louis Uccellini - would show up. I gave a research update one time and he told me, and I quote, "good job"

For the cold outbreak following the storm, at least on the GFS I've noticed a consistent pattern where the VA and even NC piedmont gets sub-zero lows and we're stuck in the single digits. This isn't elevation dependent since it's placing them in low elevation areas to the south and snowpack is high everywhere. Instead it looks like it's because of low-level winds that are calm down south but present at 925mb above Maryland. I've seen this same thing in forecasts after snow events last year and I still can't understand the dynamical reason for it. Is Emporia VA and thereabouts really a better place for vodka cold following a storm pass than MD?

This would be in PREPBUFR no? I'm almost bored enough to check

Anyone know if other models are getting extra data sampling the baja low or just GFS? Sometimes good observations outweigh model accuracy and I'm unsure if this is something that would require knobs to be turned at other met centers who probably don't care as much about a CONUS event