psuhoffman

With the recent pacific thermal profile the way it is I doubt blocking can overcome a bad pacific longwave pattern anymore. The equation has tilted against us in that regard.

I’ve been to busy between coaching soccer and a new job I took to work on a winter outlook much until recently. I’m putting it together now. But I’ll say this, I’m about as conflicted as I’ve ever been. There are a lot of conflicting signals, even more than typical for a seasonal forecast. I could see this being anything from another dreg year to a blockbuster and in hindsight I’d feel like the warnings or signals were there. But I have little confidence which signals will win out.

It’s impotent because there is a huge SER that’s winning the airmass war. I see that as an unrelated problem. I’m not sure there is anything about the blocking that’s part of that. Same as the last few. We had a near record block last year and we torched because of the SER.

On the 18zgfs the NAO goes neg around Nov 17 and stays strongly neg through the end of the run on the 25. Imo that’s legit. It’s failure to assist our snow chances on that run was a product of the mid latitude pattern and the pacific not anything to do with the NAO in my opinion. But we might be arguing apples and oranges here.

I think Ji was just being Ji

Yes. We have overcome a crappy pacific later in winter with a -NAO. But it’s becoming almost impossible early season given the current SST torch. Frankly it’s probably gonna be hard to overcome a crap pacific even later in winter given how warm the ssts are. Imo this is partly why the recent hostile PDO phase has been more of a disaster than the last few. In past hostile PDO cycles we had some snowy periods where the Atlantic canceled the pacific. That equation hasn’t worked at all lately. This might be semantics and I’m about to talk a lot about an op solution at range which won’t happen and will look different in 6 hours but I think my point is valid. While I’m not 100% sure how you mean “bootleg” I’d refrain from that language because to me it implies the NAO isn’t legit or is in some way not canonical. But the -NAO on the 18z Gfs is a canonical -NAO coupled with a 50/50 vortex and even western Canada/EPO ridge! The fact that it doesn’t impact the eastern CONUS mid lat pattern and links with a huge SER again isn’t due to any deficiency in the high latitude pattern. Just like what’s happened several times in the last 7 years, the SER simply wins. The western energy cuts under the high latitude flow out west then fails to progress and flatten the SER. Instead the SER pumps so much in response to that approaching wave it becomes a mid lat block and stalls the progression. We’ve seen this exact thing play out a lot and it’s why we’ve been in such a funk since the only way historically to really overcome a crappy pac cycle was with a -NAO. But recently it hasnt worked. But it’s not because all those NAOs were “bootleg” they simply aren’t having the same impact on the mid latitudes because the SER is winning the see saw tug of war battle in the flow.

Obviously we want both but early season I’ll take the pacific over the Atlantic.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/joke

It took until mid November for models to agree on what October 31 looked like?

I used to do that nonsense. At one point I had 3 pairs. For the last 14 seasons I was riding on a pair of Atomic Access. Just got a pair of Rustler 10s and can't wait to get out there. So far the only game in town is Killington with 2 measly intermediate trails open that require hike to, mostly for publicity and to artificially inflate their season length stats. Not worth an 8 hour drive. As soon as someone opens even just a few legit runs I will go.

They better be some backup POS pair from the 1970s and not anything you care about if you're breaking them out on 1-3" of snow

I agree there are certainly too many unreasonable people anywhere...but there does seem to be a higher concentration of them in our area compared to other places I've lived or spent significant time.

It's the DC area. Way too many people are a bad combination of miserable, picky, and demanding.

Let me be clear...its way more good than bad. But if I am digging deep for any signs of possible trouble... the tropical forcing is having less impact to the hemispheric pattern downstream than in those years, as of yet. You can also see that in those charts.

The forcing is weak (not necessarily good since we need something to counter the recent base state), but its in the perfect location.

Maybe I missed a 384op map. I posted a 240 EPS anomaly map. This is the November long range thread not the purely “what’s the winter going to be” thread. The long range looks warm for now. That was it. Posting a day 10 ensemble in early Nov means nothing for what winter will end up like. It does mean the current long range looks hostile to snow. Oh well. It’s November. But I have had several warning level events by thanksgiving. I don’t expect one this year.

You’re looking too closely at one data point to see the pattern. There is a typical Nino pattern here, with an enhanced STJ and numerous storms sliding by to our south. Some years more of those impact us. Others less. This makes qpf variable since we straddle the NW periphery of the mean storm track. But that’s where you want to be for snow. Raw qpf is irrelevant to us getting a 20”+ winter (good for DC area) since that takes just 2” of QPF to fall as frozen. So whether we get 15” or 20” qpf in the winter season isn’t all that important to snowfall.

Had more than flurries...had a pretty good squall around 7:30, was too warm to amount to much, did briefly whiten the ground.

He liked a post from one of the crazies

May I refer you to a better source given your preferences

Everyone can’t even agree on what years are modoki. It’s much more a spectrum than many describe it. But you’re right the nature of the Nino matters a lot. I know 1992 was considered a modoki by some, enough that it’s listed as such in one paper I read and on a web archive. But the sst charts I use to get a better picture excluded data from 1991 and 1992 so I can’t see for myself. I know 1995 was also considered a modoki and it was a POS winter. I just try to guard against drilling down too much. In general a Nino gives a by far the greatest chances of a snowy winter wrt “normal”. But it’s not 90%+. It’s like 70% when all other enso is like 25-35% depending on the specifics. So yea we want Nino but it’s not “it’s definitely gonna snow a lot” just probably. And I’m hesitant to try to attribute what went wrong in the 30% of ninos that aren’t super snowy to any one factor because no one factor can be blamed for all of them. They said there is plenty of evidence that the eruption was a significant contributing factor. But how significant?

I don’t mean to say it didn’t have an impact. But we’ve had other ratter +AO ninos that had nothing to do with a volcanic eruption. Was Pinatubo the catalyst or just a contributing factor? Just speculating. There are so many anomalies in this game I always am skeptical of simple solutions. I am not discounting it, it was one of the two things on my list of that worry me most about winter. Unfortunately I think the research speculated that a -QBO makes it worse. Causes an inverse reaction to a typical -QBO Nino reaction.

There is some overlap here. There is correlation between the pacific loading pattern we want associated with a Nino and a -AO. Nothing is iron clad but its a fairly rare case to get a canonical nino pacific and a raging positive AO. So I think its fair to speculate "what happened there" wrt to 1992. But that doesn't mean we can conclusively say "Pinatubo" either. It's easy to do that as its an obvious anomaly that coincided with another anomaly but correlation does not always mean causation. It's very possible it was just a random fluke caused by a bunch of more discreet factors we can't fully fathom yet.