psuhoffman

someone posted that JB comment yesterday “the better h5 gets the worse the surface gets” it got me thinking last night. And it brought be back to what you said about the upper low being “dead”. You were right. Getting a TPV stuck under a block and having a lobe tear off into the upper Midwest isn’t that unusual. It’s how several of our big snows came about. But it remaining totally disconnected from the flow and acting like a kicker instead of flow pinwheel and amplifying force is what is unusual. The detached lobe is acting more like the actual TPV than a typical ULL after detaching from a TPV. We wanted it further away not closer in that case! But I do wonder if there is a tipping point at which if it does get far enough south it has to phase v act like a kicker? That might be our only hope since we can’t get a storm with a PV sitting that close to us and the ULL is acting more like a weak PV than an ULL. This might also be why I didn’t see any in between solutions. Either snows way way south or north. This just might be a rare enough scenario though that I’m not finding any examples because the first such instance since we started keeping reliable upper level data is about to happen.

I’m not going to be sucked into defending the most extreme crazy statements “on my side” or a debate. Maybe some took it way too far. I’ve not seen a lot of that. We’ve had really good discussions and by running regression studies it looks like we’ve lost about 20% of our snowfall over the last 100 years and the trend is continuing. That’s it. I’m depressed enough about that reality without listening to some nut that takes it too far and says it’s never gonna snow again.

I’m 99% sure the gfs was simply right because of its typical errors being right in the correct direction for once. But I do wonder if the AI is less prone to errors due to estimating conditions in data sparse regions.

I only said what I said because that guys post was kinda ridiculous and hostile right off the bat. You probably could have made the point in a better way and I wouldn't have been that way.

Sorry

See now you're getting it!

@AlexD1990 my non Ass response... the mid atlantic forum is too freaking large geographically. Look at the other forums, NYC metro and Philly have their own... there is one just for PA but its really become central and western PA and the southern part is in ours and the eastern is in Philly. The geographic area "mid atlantic" is too big to have a producting regional discussion about the weather. There is almost no chance, for example, a snowstorm that crushes the southeast parts of the "Mid atlantic" even gives me flurries up here on the northern edge of the mid atlantic. And frankly I am NOT even the northern edge of the actual mid atlantic as most definitions of that include PA. But I am the northern edge of this forums arbitrary geography. The point is the weather differences between Hagerstown MD and Va Beach are way too ridiculous to be in the same thread. They are screaming YES this is awesome for the same run that makes us want to dive off a cliff. And you can't pretend this is 100% science and not emotional. Frankly this thread even restricted to the DC centric area is still difficult as MOST storms wont affect us all equally...my biggest snow this year skunked most of this thread and their two biggest snows fringed me. But at least the storms affect us. Some systems that affect parts of the larger regions dont affect us at all. So we have to have sub regional threads within this way too large geographic sub forum imo. And telling the people how to feel and post is kinda silly. That is NEVER going to work. THink about that.

yes, but do we really need to have a semantics discussion now because I misspoke?

the 12z isn't any better for me, I went from 0" to 0"

Paragraph please

I am an ass! But... they have forums to go into that are discussing this storm the way they want... you know because you are in them having that discussion. One is below. Going into another forum and telling THEM how THEY should be talking about stuff is...well, I'm not gonna take that ish seriously sorry.

Explain it in a paragraph please

Did you say something?

Maybe, but I tend to think its also what I said in my previous post...the GFS was right for the wrong reasons. Which happens sometimes. But its more likely its bias was simply playing into the what the eventual sampling errors were going to cause. It got lucky in other words. Things have changed...there was a clear trend over the last 24 hours that flattened the flow ahead of the TPV in the midwest and also a trend towards a more positively tilted trough. However, if you go back 3 days to when all guidance, even the GFS, showed what it did...under that paradigm I think the GFS was just wrong and doing its "I have trouble with complex setups" thing. Had THAT paradigm that existed even on the GFS been correct I think a more amplified storm was the correct solution. The problem was that paradigm was wrong...the flow was going to be a lot more progressive and less amplified. But the GFS in its bias was incorrectly projecting what turned out to be the correct solution for a different reason. Thats why it was starting to move in the wrong direction then had to reverse course suddenly!

We didn't start to get big model runs for Dec 2009 until inside 100 hours out. If we are going to treat 100 hour rug pulls like we used to treat the 24 hour ones...well that just shows us how far we've come. We didnt' even take 100 hours seriously back then! But a lot of our snowstorms didn't show up until around 100 hours recently. I know 2018, my last big snowstorm here, didn't look like much until inside 72 hours.

Dilly Dilly

It wasn't a lecture to you, it was just how I do business

It kinda makes sense though... @WEATHER53 this also pertains to the discussion about models we were having yesterday. There are multiple things that can cause a model error. One of the main ones is obviously a deficiency in the "math" of the model. We don't have the ability to model the atmosphere 100% accurately. But the other is sampling error. We also don't have the ability to sample every square inch of the world at every level 100%. So the models are forced to guess and estimate what is going on and initialize the atmosphere globally as best they can. And a very small error in that initialization due to a lack of sampling can lead to exponential errors when you get out to 100, 200, forget about it at 300 hours. So...in this case...what if the error here wasn't in the euro's math, it was sampling. What if the sampling that we had at 140 hours out really did create an initialization (in error) that had it been correct, had the atmosphere really actually been that way, the most likely outcome was a big snowstorm here! The math wasnt making a mistake, the mistake was the atmosphere never actually looked that way. Something important to that storm was in a data sparce area and the models did their best to guess what was going on and it wasn't totally right. A piece of energy was either more or less amplified. So...under this premise...from 150 to 100 hours the GFS wasn't "getting it right". We know from verification scores it really is the worse model of the major globals. What was happening is it was right for the wrong reasons. It was messing up the math in the same direction that the sampling error was occurring. Then there was a very brief moment in time for one run where the GFS started to "get it" under the old paradigm where the sampling error was creating the false impression a storm should be coming. But by the next run that sampling error was discovered, the new data showed a storm was less likely as we realized something was not the way we thought, and so then ALL guidance started to move in that direction. This is just an educated guess...but I think its very plausible and I've seen this kind of thing happen like this before. Others with more knowledge of the inner workings of these things could chime in, I love these kinds of thought puzzles.

I made a deal with the devil, sorry we’re not getting snow for 20 years. But it was worth it. Eagles won the Super Bowl!!! Yeah!!!!

Im holding out some hope until tonight still, but what shook me last night was the flow ahead of the TPV got significantly more suppressive. That wasn’t an issue. My optimism was driven by the fact the models had the low so far southeast because of a weird and honestly destructive instead of constructive relationship between the upper low and the SS wave. Bob made a good point that it was “dead” energy wise and acting like a kicker instead of a pinwheel in the flow to pull the storm up. But I felt that was a mistake. But now we have compounding issues! Now the confluence is a problem also!

No when things are bad I’m not a blow smoke up your ass rainbows and sunshine kinda person. When my team loses in the playoffs I don’t say “there’s always next year”. “Ya and the odds of us winning are no better, actually they’re worse we could suffer injuries and not even make the playoffs”. And I’m not that way with snow. You have no idea when the next opportunity with this good a setup comes along. We don’t know yet if the PDO is actually flipping. We might not get another shot like this for 5 years. Next year we could get another 2020 Or 2023 type winter! DCA only beats climo 1-2 times a decade. What if this was that good winter and we just got unlucky and missed our chance and now we have 6 more awful dreg years to suffer through before we get another! Im not who you come to for comfort if you need to see the bright side. Im a dose of reality good or bad. When it’s bad I dive into that lake of misery and swim in it. I cleanse myself in the fire through pain and suffering. And I come out the other side hardened and ready to go to battle again and take on whatever shit tomorrow has to throw at me.

Eagles won the Super Bowl

Funny I just looked and he didn’t reply to that thread lol.

Plot turn: as these things happen at or below our latitude less and less frequently it makes missing each opportunity even more catastrophic

Well now that’s starting to make more sense. I did find NC snowstorms they were decent analogs. Not VA or Delmarva ones.