psuhoffman

we had a blizzard what would have been presidents weekend 1958 but the holiday was still called Washington’s Birthday then.

If you think the lack of a blockbuster rare huge snowstorm Feb 20-28 is not just the product of a random chance distribution of a rare event over a limited sample then explain the causation. Finding some pattern in numbers means absolutely nothing if you can’t show there is causality and it’s not just an artifact or randomness.

Persistence works more than 50% but it’s not enough to just rely on it. just off my head these winters featured significant pattern shifts and storm track changes 1993, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2022

Where the warmest anomalies are changes exactly how the pattern sets up. A more west based Nino places the tropical forcing closer to the dateline which is where we want it. That tends to correlate with a trough southwest of Alaska...the downstream impacts of which are good for us. An east based nino shifts the whole pattern further east and often we see the north pacific trough end up too close to the Pacific NW which floods the CONUS with pac puke. We need that to be pulled back some.

Sometimes a QPF pattern persists all season...sometimes not. Remember 2015, Everyone thought we were toast when all those snows hit north of us through January and early Feb...then it became our turn from Feb 15 into March. That was maybe the most extreme example but it's hit or miss whether the a pattern persists the whole cold season...the problem with using persistence is it works until it doesn't and it's hard to predict when the pattern is going to change until it does.

The latest CANSIPS was indicating a possible modoki nino. That would increase our chances significantly.

It's true that we will lose the deep constant cold and enter a more variable period...but so long as we have blocking in February or March there is the threat of a snowstorm.

can we really call it a jackpot?

The humidity might rise slightly for a time.

Tracking clouds

So much here…We almost get a snowstorm 48 hours after this. On aigfs we do. And it’s the long range gfs.

There are some similarities to 2018 only in this case the TPV was weaker to begin with and the warming is happening about a week earlier. Obviously we will need luck to go our way...but if we got a similar pattern to March 2018 and got it to set in 7-10 days earlier AND with a colder N American profile to start... I would roll the dice with that.

Might take the kids to snowshoe

90% of our winters end in disappointment. March snow has nothing to do with it.

PD is a different date each year. Baltimore had a top 20 snow on Feb 19th. That’s layer than PD 90% of the time. So now we’re just talking 8 days? Yes there hasn’t been a too 20 event from Feb 20-28. But there have been big snows after that. It’s a fluke. If anything it means we’re due to get a storm that week! There are so many weeks without a top 20 snowstorm. They are so rare and some weeks have 3 of them meaning there are many weeks with none. The last week of December. The first week of January. January 9-21 have none! Why don’t you obsess about those? you do this with lots of things. You seem to try to assign meaning to randomness. The fact a super rare event hasn’t happened in the 140 years of records that one week is just a product of random chance. There are several other weeks without a big snow and I promise you if we had records that went back far enough you’d see that storms can happen those weeks and this is just random chance over a limited period of time.