psuhoffman

It is risky but it can work. I’m shocked how similar the setup is to Jan 22 1987 given its nearly the same time of year and that was one of my top analogs! There was no high in front of that one. It had a little wave rotate around ahead of the anchor vortex but the key was that the trough remained positive tilted until the partial phase with the stj in the southeast. That way once the storm starts to get pulled north it won’t track inside where we need it. But it’s a very similar progression to what the gfs just did. This would be like a best possible case outcome for this type of setup of course but this can work if the wave stays positive until it’s east of the Mississippi. There was a storm in 1966 that was somewhat similar with a due north track also. Also one of my top analogs!

Are you telling us or trying to convince yourself?

Sorry. I’ve always been DC/Baltimore metro centric with my posts and analysis. Maybe part of that is I lived in the DC metro area for 10 years before moving up here. And it’s because that seems to be where the vast majority of this forum is centered. I never never say it was a great run when it shows me with 8” and DC rain. Besides I was mostly just piggy backing on da @Ji and @stormtrackerword play. I’d probably prefer the 12z solution better not to deal with the threat of mix anywhere near us. It was a better run for more people but less upside in the flush hit zone. But now we’re splitting hairs on a 5 day forecast. I wish EVERYONE in here could get a flush hit. I’d gladly take a gfs solution shifted 30 miles east where maybe I get 6” instead of 9” but @CAPE can get 6” instead of 3! As long as I get enough to use my snowblower for the first time in a few years I’ll be happy! But the truth is this is unlikely to be intense enough to have that expended a snow shield even if the more amplified solutions are right. Very few storms are. But I guess I focus on DC and when I see them get a flush hit my instruct says good run.

It was a flush hit for 95! We can’t get a much better run for 90% of this sub than that. But I sympathize that it wasn’t as great for the eastern shore.

Given where everything else is I’m glad the euro is where it is. If the euro and gfs were both flush hits and the gem uk NW we would be worried about it going NW. right now the median of all guidance is a hit and that’s not a bad spot.

That run was da bomb

Did you throw in the bus to sweeten the pot?

We're running out of time. Did they deliver a ransom note?

Having a strong vortex there creates 2 complications IMO. It can be a suppressive element. It guarantees the northern stream will be diving down and rotating pieces of energy over us. Unless they time up and phase where we need them that can act to squash the southern stream waves we need. We could see that next week. It can also cause a cutter. If the TPV wobbles west and phases it can create a bomb storm that cuts even in a -NAO. We are seeing that this week. I have long stated my preference if we get a blocking regime is to have a very weak or no TPV at all on our side. And yes I know that creates the issue of will it be cold enough. But historically having the NS out of the way completely during a split flow pattern is the most likely path to snow here. It's less complicated. Just get some southern stream wave to come along and amplify without any NS interference. Just have to be cold enough. Yea I know...thats been a problem too.

But there was a significant drop in the probabilities. There was an increase in suppressed OTS solutions. But were getting into the range where the ensembles follow the op trends mostly. It's not some horrible proclamation, it was a bad run of the euro, op and ens. So what, its been wrong plenty lately. If we take an average of where ALL the guidance is right now its actually a pretty decent solution for us, and I would prefer needing that than ANY one model right now. It's slightly troubling the euro went off on a tangent with a suppressed solution today, because yes it has the best physics and so if one model will sniff out some change first its the most likely, so yea I would prefer it to be some other model off on the tangent....but I still wouldn't take the euro v EVERYTHING ELSE. The other models that fail actually do it in the oppposite way, too amplified! Well except the icon but having that POS in your camp is actually a mark of shame.

it's not so much confluence here as simply where the boundary ends up, but if the TPV were to shift slightly and that boundary ends up further NW that would help yes. There are other moving parts though, a stronger wave would help also.

That's not how they work. All the effort is put into making the operational (and ensemble control just at lower resolution) as accurate as possible. The purpose of the individual ensemble members is actually to produce a spread of solutions. Because we know we will not initialize the atmosphere completely correctly AND we won't be able to project it perfectly even if we did...they produce members that have been slightly perturbed (changed) in some way in order to show a spectrum of possibilities to account for the errors. This can tell us a variety of things. At long leads the average of all those solutions is way more accurate than the operational. Even though the operational is the most accurate at short leads, over time chaos takes over and the average of a ton of slightly perturbed runs is more likely to catch what is most likely going to happen in the distant future than any one run. It can also help tell us if the operation just had a hiccup and spit out a bad run. If the ensemble members are all different even at shorter leads its likely the op got something wrong. But I don't think they track each members accuracy scores. The goal isn't to create a specific member that is accurate. I'm not even sure the same members are perturbed the same way each run. I would be curious about that myself.

OK we need to put out an APB for the real Chuck. They have him tied up to a chair in a basement somewhere.

It complicates things. It can work...but you're right it adds another level of complexity and we don't usually do complicated. The first big storm in January 1987 was an example of how a Hudson bay vortex can work though...but it requires us to get the NS to play nice with the STJ and lately we know how that often ends.

Depends...if we truly go suppressed and don't get anymore legit threats yea I would say it would be unfair to blame this on the elephant in the room. But...we've already wasted a couple "in the box" storms this year. We need a system to track through a specific area for us to get a snowstorm. How many of those chances you think we get in a winter? In 2010 there were 5. DC only wasted 1 and it was very early Dec, places just NW got snow. The other 4 all produced significant snow. 2016 had 5 and DC partially wasted 4 of them. A couple had some degree of mixed precip and some snow, one was in March and was just too warm, one was early January and still too warm following the Dec torch...but out of 5 perfect tracks only 1 produced big snow. Luckily it was BIG BIG BIG snow. But that's why 2016 wasnt 2010, both had 5 storms through our box but 4/5 were too warm in 2016 v 1/5 in 2010. If at the end of the winter we had 4 or 5 waves that took a perfect track and only 1 or worse none produced snow...then I think its fair to say the elephant had something to do with it. IF we go the rest of this winter without anymore ideal track systems then maybe we chalk it up to more of a fluke thing. But will any of us even survive the slaughterhouse this place will become by then to do that analysis anyways?

8-0 is way more probable than 8-3. On the grand scheme of things the snow with any wave is a pretty small geographic area. The degree of error we need in either direction to go from 8 to 3 is way way way less than the permutations that can produce 0. A HUGE area will get 0 lol.

Think about the ensembles. They make minor perturbation's to the initial conditions and it completely changes the outcome once you get out past a few days because very minor differences at short ranges become exponential at 100+ hours. So even if we had the math perfected to perfectly predict the atmosphere (which we dont) we still couldnt actually do it because we don't have 100% accurate measurements from every inch of the atmosphere to initialize hour 0. And unless you get the initial 0 hour totally 100% correct the rest of your projection will be wrong and the further out in time you go the more wrong it will be. So what happens is every run we do the best way can with all our observations and satellite and aircraft data input into the model to initialize the atmosphere correctly. Then the model uses that to project whats going to happen. But then the next run we get new observations and it sees what we got wrong last time and fixes it, and that changes the outcome. Sometimes not much, certainly not much at 6 or 12 or 24 hours...but out at 100 hours pretty minor changes can have huge impacts. A couple MB wrong with a feature at 6 hours can end up changing the result by hundreds of miles at 120 hours away.

Well duh...if I lived in VA beach or Richmond VA or Ocean City MD I might like how that mean looks...but I don't I live in this area.

Oddly all the guidance at 12z kinda fell into their biases I've observed, GGEM/UKMET over amped, ICON progressive, GFS too far SE, except the Euro which was off on its own planet. Just an observation, not sure what to do with it.

That’s not gonna work.

I will say this...we have now had 17 days of a damn near perfect longwave pattern for snow, pretty much since the pacific jet shifted around xmas. And so far we have 2 perfect track rain events and 2 cutters to show for it. Yes I know we were left with a torched thermal profile after the December Pac onslaught, I don't know why everyone feels the need to point that out. But it will be comical in a Shakespeare tragedy kinda way, if we continue somehow through winter...finding ways to fail despite a pattern that matches every huge snow winter we've had. After being too warm the TPV drops down on top of us and suppresses everything for weeks...then maybe we finally get it to relax but it shifts too far west and we get cutters again. The meltdowns will be entertaining at least.

I know you're kidding but I do not think this is the type of setup where we will see a huge NW shift once guidance does settle on a solution. Right now its bouncing all over because fairly minor changes in a lot of factors have a huge impact on this, so they are all over the place. But once they settle in on a basic solution I don't expect HUGE shifts NW with the boundary. This isn't the same type scenario as last week.

There were plenty of EPS members with this suppressed nothing solution. There are two options here... either the Euro op is leading the way and the others are now just where it was yesterday and will catch up to the suppressed idea soon. Or the op euro just randomly drew a solution out of different chaotic options affected by minor changes and it messed one of them up and it will come around to the others soon. I have no idea which one it is, and neither does anyone else.

You know this is BS. First of all of course a cutter doesn't just go away because for a storm to cut up into the lakes it has to be way way way more amplified than the subtle arctic boundary wave we are tracking for our snow here. A very minor difference won't make a 988 cutter just turn into nothing but a subtle difference on a weak boundary wave can. But cutters change all the time, but we don't give a crap if the snowfall goes from 12" to 6" in Green Bay or if the snow line moves 50 or 100 miles when its 600 miles away from us!

how often has it snowed lately?