Don't misunderstand me... I am still optimistic we get another snowy pattern from about Mid February into March. I am unsure early Feb honestly. Hopefully the next round maximizes potential a bit more than this last one. It wasn't awful but we needed a little more out of a 3-4 week good longwave pattern.
But the point I was trying to make is lately anytime we get a bad longwave pattern it isn't just kinda warm, its a complete TORCH. And even in a Nino when forcing is located where we want most of the winter we are still going to be unfavorable periods mixed in. We are never going to have a wall to wall no hostile period at all winter. So the excuse of "its not warming its that we are still recovering from the torch" is circular thinking and makes no sense to me. We often wont have weeks to wait for a colder airmass to slowly carve its way back into our area after a bad pattern. The fact that warm patterns torch the continent so bad that it takes weeks to recover and have a chance of snow is part of the same problem not an excuse.