psuhoffman

@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”?

@Maestrobjwa @brooklynwx99 Look I’m not JB or DT. If I’m wrong and in the next 10 years Baltimore averages 25” of snow I’ll gladly admit it. I’ve been wrong about many things in my life. And I have no problem admitting when I am. Yes this is somewhat speculative. But there is enough data to say the speculation has some merit and deserves further examination and attempts at proof. I hope I’m wrong. I hope we go into some 1960s snowgasm soon and I have to admit I was 100% wrong. We will see.

All science starts as speculation. That’s step 1. Yes we need to do more work to prove anything but that never happens if we squash the speculation.

@Terpeast did a perfect job explaining it. I wasn’t yelling at you. I didn’t type in caps. we have discussed this a lot over the years. Maybe not so much this winter. It’s depressing so I gave it a rest. I wish perfect track rainstorms was the worst of it. That’s not even the biggest problem. I’ll give you another example. You know how the SER keeps linking up with the -nao? In past -pna -nao patters the western trough would slide east under the block over the SER suppressing it. But what happens if you shift everything north some? Make that SER just a little warmer and stronger…and eventually you hit a tipping point where it links up with the high latitude ridge and now the trough gets stuck in the west! Sound familiar?

As for your second point yes there might be times something shifting north is a good thing. But that’s going to be outnumbered 3-1 by the times it’s bad. We were already on the southern fringe of where snow was a regular event in winter. Places not far south of us snow was already some rare freak occurrence. Shifting the climate zones north is a huge loss for us. Yes some NC blizzard from the 70s might hit us now! But guess what we get everything else that goes with that. We lose all the storms that his us then! It’s a net loss!

I don’t know how you forecast without factoring this in! And there are ways to know. Terp did a great job of quantifying how the boundary layer warming will affect storms with the same track from years ago. We could use a sophisticated simulation to project how patterns have been affected. It’s not easy. It’s depressing but that shouldn’t stop the discourse. But how do you predict without accounting for significant changes in the effect of patterns?

The mountains in NW SC get a big winter once in a while. How did DC do that winter? About what Greenville or Spartanburg outside the mts do in a good year lol.

Or…. places south of us aren’t getting much snow either. Yes every once in a blue moon an anomaly happens and somewhere south gets snow. And every time someone posts that it’s a good sign for us. No it’s not. It just means we are now in the same lot as them where every once in a long while we get a fluke anomaly event to get snow. The line where snow happens “regularly” in winter has pushed north of us in general. For the last 8 years we’ve been getting the same results as you would expect from upstate SC. Exactly. DC is getting the results you would expect from outside the mountains and I’m getting the results you would expect from a bit higher elevation in NW SC!

Wrt Jan 20 I wouldn’t get too in the weeds. There are lots of variables you can over analyze. But in general the western ridge is fine. The biggest issue is just that there is no healthy STJ wave at the right time. So absent that what we need is simply more dig from the NS. To get this I think we need more separation between the main TPV vortex and whatever NS SW is rotating around the back side of the trough at that time. The guidance can’t even agree on which SW it wants to amplify run to run! But whatever it is it needs more separation to be able to amplify and dig further south.

There is a lot of truth here…but unless my memory (and the data) is wrong, failing in a good pattern used to be when DC and Philly would miss getting a big storm and would nickel and dime through. 20 Years ago we would be mad if right now Philly or dc had 3-4” from a bunch of near misses at bigger storms. They have absolutely NOTHING

Ya I’m with ya. I was originally imagining a string of storms. The analogs indicated that. But we can still save this… Ok puke and rally, time to go hecs hunting!

I agree. I’m not throwing in the towel yet because we could get a hecs in this pattern and then we would just need one or two more secs level events to get there. It’s doable. But we’re getting late in the game now. I really thought we would hit on one of these January chances and now I’m thinking we might not. One thing to root for when this pattern reloads in Feb is not to have a tpv stuck under the block right on top of us next time. That complicates things. I think we will be cold engine after the epo pna ridge dumps cold into the east late Jan that we can roll without a tpv near us and let the stj go to work without any NS interference! I know this current pattern worked in 66 and 87 but the NS is on steroids lately and it doesn’t dig as much as it used too, not sure that can work as well anymore. I’d prefer a split flow with the NS way out of the way.

That’s what my fear is. It would be one thing if the pattern never evolved right. Like if the yo-yos ignoring the forcing plots and saying this was an extreme east based Nino like 1998 were right and we got a non stop jet onslaught into the west…then maybe we can’t draw much from it. But if we get the pattern of all those big snow years, and we have, but don’t get the snow. I don’t mean no snow, but if the pattern that’s responsible for all our 40”+ winters only produces like 20” this year, that’s even more depressing and damning imo if you consider what it implies! And the last most annoying part of that will be the “everything is fine don’t you dare mention CC” crew will insist “look we got 10-20” see it’s fine” not realizing how bad it is to only get a mediocre result in a pattern that’s produced epic winters almost every other time!

If we’re gonna break the streak I want it to be where a legit snowstorm. I don’t want to end it with some 1.1” BS that’s not not even enough snow to do anything with. I’d rather keep the streak just for the comedy.

You know I agree but putting all our eggs in Feb is risky. We needed this winter to be big not just ok. This is our high bar pattern year. It needs to be 40” not 20” and we’re starting to waste way too many chances to feel optimistic this year gets to 1958, 1966, 1987, 2003, 2010 levels. Those were the analogs. That’s the bar.

The eps has been absolutely crushing the pattern even out to day 30! If you’ve been following the weeklies the day 16-30 just transitions right into day 15 seamlessly and you can go bank and look at day 20-30 means and they’ve ended up almost exactly the long wave pattern when it became day 1-10! It’s happening again. The gefs has been ok but it’s had way more hiccups and tangents. A few days after that the tpv gets displaced again and the nao goes negative and we roll through Feb with a pretty good pattern. But we’ve been in that pattern for 20 days now! The reasons we have yet to snow are not the long wave pattern. It’s been bad luck with meso details within the pattern. Although I think the NS not digging enough next Tuesday or Friday and the last storm being too warm are perhaps not just bad luck but I’ll reserve that debate for the panic room. We just have to hope at some point we get more luck with one of these threats. In the pattern we seem to have through Feb they will keep coming. It would be eye opening if we manage to waste them all. This isn’t like 2020 or 2023 with there was just no chance.

Why do you keep saying this can’t go in my book. It failed similarly to many of our fails. We needed NS cooperation which is harder when you have an accelerated jet displaced north which is 100% related to the elephant! We had nearly identical patterns to this in 1966 and 1987 that each produced multiple snowstorms. But it required a NS wave to dig down into the MS valley to phase with the STJ and produce a coastal storm. This time the waves are all flat and none dig enough. The NS not digging far enough south anymore is most definitely book worthy.

If I didn’t have kids I’d be with you. But they want to make a huge snow fort like we did 3 years ago. I used my snow blower to push all the snow in the side yard (can’t F up the aesthetics) into a huge pile and we made a big castle. We need about 4” to be able to set it high enough not to wreck the grass and move enough snow. So that’s my bar. I need a 4” storm. Less is a headache because they will be driving me nuts wanting to do it and whining when it’s not enough. ETA if it’s dry snow it probably has to be more like 6” to work.

For our purposes the 3rd wave was the most likely to produce a snowstorm. The 2nd was ok. The first was problematic because the front hasn’t fully cleared meaning if it amplified more than just a smidge it ends up north of us. Unfortunately in the last 24 hours everything has shifted towards what the euro saw first. That the waves would split the energy and the first wave has even become dominant again which was the idea 3-4 days ago! We still could luck our way to some snow because there is an arctic boundary stalled through our region but the ceiling on this setup is now very low.

No we saw that fail a few times. But never this close in! Honestly when i realized this morning what the issue was and why the euro was doing what it was doing I had a suspicion it was right. It was opposite its two normal biases and it was due to resolved a very delicate play between two waves. That seemed something the better physics model was more likely to be resolving. But all the models seem to be too snowy in general. Im march 2018 every model showed me getting 6-10” 12 hours before the storm and I got nothing! I remember a storm in 2007 where the NAM was on an island snowing no snow when everything else showed 3-6” the day before and the NAM won. If anything shows a bad solution that’s the most likely one. And if everything shows snow they might all be wrong.

Yes. Some of them have already been annoyed when there are posts implying this year settles is, because it will NEVER be that in their mind. They won’t even like when it’s brought up!

Why not. He does that 20 times a year, is never ever right, but obviously it doesn’t affect his business so why stop?

lol