psuhoffman

DCA is depressing...

It also helps to be at the summit of a ridge because of upslope. Being at 1030 at the summit of a ridge is way different than at 1030 in a valley. Not the same results...

It's not awful IMO. Baltimore isn't typically as bad as DC area with rush hour. Plus I often can get in and out without hitting the worst of it if I plan my commute. But it's still an extra hour than if I lived where most who commute in and out of the city do. My point is anyone could do what I do, I don't have some special birth right. I made a choice to move to the snowiest spot within reasonable commuting distance to DC/Baltimore. It's not 100% the snow, I do love it up here all around. I could do with a few less confederate flags...ugh, but its not most people. And its beautiful, and in the summer its 85 instead of 93! And there are a lot of recreational outdoor activities. But the snow was a BIG part of it, I wont lie. This would be a bit further to DC...but you could easily commute to one of the ridges near Mt Airy from DC in about the same time as my commute to Baltimore...and they don't to quite as good as me but they do about as much better than DC than I do v Baltimore. I sympathize with the snow weenies still in DC or Baltimore. I really do. I lived in the DC area for a long time. And it wasn't enough snow to make me happy...so I moved! But you all could do that...no wait...then we would have an UHI up here too...dont do that. There are no places. It's awful up here. The wolves terrorize us daily. Stay away. Oh on topic...things are trending better to break the 1" streak. At this point the thing I would be most worried about in DC would be for the boundary to shift back north because that initial wave amplifies before it can clear the area.

If I had a helicopter...

about 1035

I drive an hour to and from work everyday, I won't apologize for it! The place I bought was on the market for like a year! Any one of you could have got it... Kidding not kidding. I know its in jest but I suffer every work day for the few times a year I get more snow.

Sorry my aggressive posts are directed at the snow gods not you or anyone else. Yes. Remember when I kept saying we need it to get to 50/50 over and over. I eventually stopped because it just wasn't going to happen and it was redundant. But let me illustrate why that is the magic spot for us... So picture the flow here around the 50/50...It keeps the flow out of the NW to our northeast providing the cold air but also "blocking" any wave coming along from cutting up to our west...but it also is out of the way enough to give space to any wave coming from the west to amplify. Look at the blue circle...the northern stream is out of the way pulled to our northeast where we want it. Something rotating around the 50/50 there usually just acts to prevent a cutter unless the 50/50 is too far SW OR a really strong vort comes along at the exact wrong time then yea we can squash something...but its way less an issue. SO we have a HUGE win zone...any STJ wave that comes along and tries to track northeast west of us will be forced to turn east or transfer to the coast into the box we need, black circle. Our path to a win is simple...get an STJ wave to come alone, with the NS way out of the way and room to amplify and try to turn north...get stopped in its tracks by the NS where we want it...and turn east under us. Boom But now look at the scenario with a TPV over top of us... Look at where the northern stream is directed now...right into the area we want a storm to amplify. So now...it almost guarantees some NS wave is going to be diving down on top of the STJ where we need a storm to develop. So to get a storm now we need one of those NS vorts (x's) to dig deep enough and play nice and phase with the STJ, and also we need it not to happen to soon and cut up west and not too late to go OTS and if the NS waves dont dig enough everything ends up north of us or if they don't phase nothing happens at all! It's a way more complicated setup and we don't ever seem to do complicated anymore! This can work. It has worked. 1966 and 1987 were analogs where this exact pattern worked. But... I don't think its as easy as it once was because the jet is shifted north and the NS just doesn't dig as much as it used to which is a problem in this specific scenario. Hope this helps...

Don’t go towards the light

It’s a relatively minor change so I don’t know. Let’s see how Feb 10 on trends. Fact is the -nao signal for Feb 1-10 was weak and it just ended up neutral. That’s a minor change but has a significant impact on our precarious snow chances lol.

I answered you in the panic room. Keep questions about you know what there. I’m tired of getting yelled at for talking about it here.

But the main reason I don’t like having a TPV there is that it means we need NS interaction and to get a NS SW to dig enough to phase with a storm south of our latitude. And that isn’t happening very much anymore. And I think you know what is a part of that. This exact pattern has worked out a lot in the past. Not to much recently.

Huh? look at Feb 2010. The NS is out of the way. There is no vortex there. The STJ wave in TX is alone to do its thing. There is a monster block locking a 50/50 in but the flow across Canada is just flat and out of the damn way! That’s what I like. Just get out of the STJs way. Give a stj wave room to amplify on its own without needing any NS interaction at all!

@stormy for the record it’s not personal. I don’t know you. I don’t have any issue with you. But sometimes man…like last week when you know everyone else in the storm thread is upset and you decide that’s a good time to say how awesome it is we’re getting rain because of the drought. Yea you’re right. You also know no one gives a F and that’s just going to upset people. Or a few days ago when you decided what the thread needed was a grammar cop! Or the other day, hell I don’t even know what you were on about. You made like 5 posts that didn’t even make any sense at all. I’m serious people kept quoting you and I had no idea what it meant. That’s why I said just ignore it. I didn’t say to ignore you because of our vehement but scientific disagreement over climate change. I said that because you often are off on a tangent from what the current discussion is.

Exactly. I said I didn’t like that feature before this pattern started. Wish I had been wrong about that!

I don’t think its can kicking per say but I see some slightly troubling trends for early Feb. EPS 10 days ago eps now the major features are the same. But the eps has been delaying the -nao from redeveloping. That isn’t shocking that’s really hard for guidance to get right. Unfortunately that will be huge once the pac jet extends again. There will be a brief period late Jan as the pac jet starts to extend that the configuration is perfect and we don’t need any nao help to get cold. But early Feb the pac trough gets slightly east of perfect again. Not bad. Very common for a Nino. But we need some blocking help to stop the warmer air being injected there from spreading east and taking over. It’s still not a bad look at all. We would get chances. But the new look has more thermal issues than the look 10 days ago. If you want to be an optimist the eps is trending even better for the period Feb 10-25 though. It went from good to OMG how can it not snow in that. And I know we’re all super impatient now justifiably so but Mid Feb to early March is not too late. 2014, 2015, 2018 our best snow was after Feb 10 all those years! And two of them we remember very fondly! Personally since I’m out of the area from Feb 3-10 I’m ok with the timing. lol. I’ll duck and cover now…

Not at that range in a NS dominant chaotic pattern with a pinwheeling block/tpv. You’re right in other situations.

The fact the op lost the mece isn’t a shock. The 12z ensembles showed a few hits and a lot of very light or no snow solutions. Even if the envelope improved from like 20% to 40% hits the odds would still favor the op drawing a less amplified solution. IMO people don’t attribute rhe operational results at range to chance enough. You’re just randomly getting one of the permutations possible within the envelope of likely outcomes at that range. It’s how that envelope of permutations trends run to run that matters way more than what the op says.

I’ve heard this too form reliable sources. Of course I’ve yet to see it work in our favor. But I’ve seen the gfs school the euro to our detriment a couple times and this was the reason given.

Mid Jan 2010 I famously launched an epic meltdown after Boxing Day then 2 more screw jobs and a weeks later the commutergeddon storm hit. 2018 mid March I went full tilt scorched earth then we got a snowstorm. 2021 late Jan I won’t berserk on the snow gods and we got a snowstorm Feb 1. I’ll keep it contained to the panic room. But this is all I got. If this doesn’t work I’m out of ideas. Whoever stole Jo Bu’s rum…we need to find that MFr and make a sacrifice!

I’ve heard this excuse like 5 times in the last several years. “You can’t expect it to snow despite a perfect track storm in a perfect long wave pattern because we are recovering from a torch”. That’s total 100% complete utter BS! If it takes weeks to recover from a bad pattern for us to snow…that just proves my point! In most winters we’re going to get a pac puke onslaught. It’s rare to get a winter where at some point there is no jet extension and a flood of maritime air. If we need a Fng month to recover from that…well math is really not on our side! About 5 years ago I did a case study analysis of every 5” snowstorm at BWI back to 1948! I looked at the loading pattern out to 10 days before each. We’ve had a ton of snowstorms through that history when the pattern flipped better from a “torched” pattern and we didn’t have to wait weeks. Guess what we even had some wet snowstorms during pac puke regimes in the past. It’s becoming the distant past now though. Some years we won’t ever get a favorable pattern to lock in for more than a week or two all winter. And there’s why we’ve been getting virtually no snow at all a lot lately. Yea those years would have always been bad. But in a year we’re the mean pattern is going to flood the continent with pac air if we need 3 weeks to recover it won’t snow at all. We don’t get that chance! The long wave pattern flipped Dec 23-26. That’s when the pac onslaught ended. The perfect track rainstorm was Jan 7. There is no excuse for that. Yes it did take that long. Yes we are just now getting a cold enough airmass. It took 4 cutters and a perfect track rainstorm to slowly lower heights and pull down slightly colder air behind each wave 3 weeks! That’s a problem. Most winters we will be Fd if it takes 3 weeks to get cold enough following a torch! I hate that I keep having to play devils advocate. It makes me seem more negative that I am. I still think we eventually get a good snowstorm this year. I’ll be shocked if we don’t. I agree with the pattern. I’ve said as much. But…I’m not nearly the optimist you are. Im somewhere in between you and Ji.

What about 1958, 1966, 1978, 1987??? You skipped over all those other Nino analogs. I nor anyone else said only 2003 or 2010. I didn’t predict 75” in Baltimore! I thew out the couple dud +++AO ninos because I calculated those were bad matches then I aversged all the other Nino analogs together. So why are you acting like I expected 2010? What I expected was to fall somewhere within the scope of all the previous analogs to this pattern. Forget 2010. If we want want to sniff an avg of 58,66,78,87 we’re in big big trouble if something doesn’t hit soon.

Of course. I know where we live. This isn’t Vermont. Now obviously where I live has different standards than DC. But even up here I don’t even need 2 20” storms. In I get a couple 12” storms even in March I’d probably remember it as a good year. That would be a lot of fun. I don’t grade based on average or the snow total. For example 2018 and 2019. 2019 had about 5” more here than 2018. But it mostly came a couple inches at a time and a lot of the snow wasn’t enough to do anything in and melted immediately. It was pretty frustrating. 2018 I remember more fondly because there was a decent storm in Dec then a 14” storm in March. My last 12”+ storm btw! Two periods I enjoyed with enough snow to actually play in. Go sledding. Make a snow fort. Several days of Jebwalks not having to rush before it melts in 5 mins. Give me a couple dynamic big snows in a season and I’m good.

@stormy you obviously haven’t followed my whole argument. Never have I blamed 100% of our snow drought on warming. Our snowfall is greatly affected by cyclical pacific and Atlantic sst patterns that you can easily track. Sometimes we go through great periods when they are in a positive cycle concurrently. Sometimes they are both bad and we get periods like this. And sometimes they’re in conflict and we get some combo. But our good and bad cycles are deteriorating linearly. It’s hard to see if you focus on any small chuck of time because it’s buried within the up and down cycles of snowfall. But if you pull back to see the ups are less up and the downs are more down. Example. We’ve had this same cycle we’re in now before. From 1949-57 and 1971-77. And both sucked for snow. DC averaged about 11” during those years which was way below avg in those periods. But from 2017-2024 DC is averaging 6”. 6 is worse than 11! 11 was bad. 6 is worse! Im not saying the last 8 years should have been good. The best analog to this pattern was the 2 previous least snowy cycles in our recorded history. But it’s been 40% worse that those! And our last “snowy” cycle from 2003-2016 was 30% worse than 1958-1971 the previous snowy one! What I’m saying is the ups are less up and the downs are more down. We are bleeding snow away and we didn’t have that much to give! Fibally 2F is HUGE when 50% of DCs snow always came with temps near freezing. We aren’t Daluth. 50 years ago we were already on the southern edge of the climate zone where snow was a “normal reliable” occurrence. Even back then snow was an anomaly that might not happen much at all year to year in places like Raleigh NC. More recently Richmond has entered that zone. And imo the 2016 super Nino pushed it one more notch and now DC is south of the line where snow is a normal reliable winter event. If you asked me to quantify it I’d say DC area has lost about 30% of their snow climo. DC is probably where Richmond was before now. Snow can happen. There can even be a 30” season. Richmond used to get them. But I know growing up in DC area when I’d hear people in Richmond complain about no snow I’d snicker it’s not supposed to snow down there. They are south of the “it’s supposed to snow in winter” line. That’s us now!

Naw it would have been snow in NC!

2002-2016 wasn’t torrid here. DC and Baltimore were below avg snowfall then, just less below than since! I made this point that 2002-2016 should have been a huge red flag for places like DC. It was an amazing run with a perfect mean long wave pattern. it won’t get much better than that ever. Yet while places further north were getting buried by 150% of normal snow we were getting 90%. Since 2000 DC and Baltimore decoupled from NYC wrt snowfall. They used to be correlated and get about the same % of normal most years. Not since. It started below 40*. It’s creeping north! Yes true recent period has sucked like the 50s and early 70s. But it’s worse than those! About 25% worse. The last good period was worse here than the ones before! Why do you expect the next favorable pdo amo cycle to buck that trend? Yes I suspect we will do better than now. That’s not my argument. But will we ever get back to when Baltimore averaged close to 25” which was true from 1890-1970? Or will the next good period avg 18”?