psuhoffman

Red Dot

They need to gerrymander the forecast zones to cut out his block as if he were some start up candidate in a primary against an entrenched party bulwark

You also rarely have a sounding that looks like this... The only issue there is the surface... seriously why is it 33 in the middle of the night under heavy precip north of the NS thermal boundary on February 17th? But that aside... the surface is important obviously if its actually 33 and thus the snow compacts and melts some as it hits the ground. But if it were to be say 31 at the surface instead of 33 and the rest of that sounding is accurate you very well could get 12 or 15-1 ratios. It's common for these NS waves to have fairly high ratios, what hasn't been common lately is for them to track south enough for it to do us any good. In this case what might ruin that for us is weirdly high surface temps given the situation.

Surface temps. Kuchera uses the warmest temp below h5 as a significant part of the calculation. Looking at soundings a lot of the area is right at 32 during the snowfall. First of all, that is a little warmer than I expected for a NS wave at night with the thermal boundary south of us! That said, so long as temps get below freezing so there isn't actually a lot of compaction as the snow hits the ground (at night there shouldn't be so long as temps are BELOW 32, gonna be close unfortunately) IMO the temps in the DGZ and through most of the column are more important. There is good saturation and lift in the DGZ so we should have near optimal snow growth. The column is cold until near the ground so there is nothing to ruin the integrity of the flakes. So long as the ground temps can be 30-31 and not 32-33 I think we will get higher ratios. 12-1 maybe. Places a little further north in the region that also get under good banding could see 15-1. But again this depends totally on ground temps not actually being 32-33. I was NOT expecting that...at night, north of the thermal boundary in a NS wave...under heavy precip, we should NOT have surface temp issues in mid February! But its going to be close...1 or 2 degrees as the surface will make all the difference here between getting low ratios due to ground compaction/melt and getting high ratios because every other level is good.

In a colder base state the nao was king. But a +pdo -nao could be cold/dry. So a lot of our snowiest years were -pdo -nao. A -pdo +nao was always a bad bad bad pattern though. Problem now imo, we’ve warmed too much for a -pdo -nao to work the same as it used too. The pac storms are coming in too amplified and dig the western trough more. The warmer gulf and atl pump the SER more. The SER links with the nao. Everything gets shifted north. It seems now the epo/pna have become more important. We’ve lost a -pdo -nao as a big snow producer combination.

When the nao block fell apart our hecs potential went with it. We’re fighting for table scraps now. Is what it is. But hey you still have a reasonable shot at climo. I have almost no chance. I need ~20” more just to get to “avg”.

Naw. That TPV lobe is really close by, which is why this wave is suppressed enough for us even despite less blocking than expected. It would have taken a really intricate complicated convoluted phased progression to get a big storm and have it be snow from this setup. It’s why I was never crazy about it. But having the blocking fall apart opened the door for the NS wave to ride the boundary and stripe us. This is about the best case scenario imo.

3k and 12k kuchera. But the ratios are being limited by the boundary temps. I think whoever gets under banding will do better than this thinks. Snow growth looks pretty optimal imo.

3k is nice too

You just got NAMd

I don’t know how much it will juice up but I think for places where the surface temps are below freezing the kuchera is under doing the ratios. The DGZ is plenty cold and saturated. Good lift. That matters more. Yea the surface temps might cut it down from 18-1 to 15-1 but somewhere that gets a combo of both cold enough and best lift will get ~15-1 to 18-1 with .3-.45 qpf that’s my 4-8” max band call right there. Where exactly that ends up is hard to say. But it’s likely near the northern periphery of the higher qpf zone.

As is it’s a Richmond special. But time. It’s still there…

close, so close. A bit more spacing between the waves and this could still be good.

Gefs eps

You would know

My neighbors have chickens. They run around my yard all the time. I’m good

From what I see it’s a noise change from 12z. Maybe slightly dryer but again noise changes.

Well the 18z euro definitely trended not north

But I’m done with worrying about it. I won’t be surprised either way at this point. Was today just a one last fluke tease run on the way to a final rug pull or a real indication? Ehh. I don’t have the patience left to dig into it really. If we get multiple days of improvements and it gets into a more believable range I’ll jump back into it. For now we still have a legit chance for the wave I liked all along if we can get some minor adjustments. After that I’ll let the chips fall where they may.

Today shifted significantly better from yesterdays which were…

Most years I’d be very nervous. But this year there really hasn’t been any north trend once inside 100 hours. The storms that did shift north all did it way before now. Under 48 hours the trend has been south really. Obviously every situation is different but the seasonal trend does matter some.