psuhoffman

Has the mjo ever saved us when things looked bad?

DC has averaged 8” the last 7 years! Baltimore isn’t much better. Where you are isn’t nearly as impacted because of elevation. The warming has happened the most in the boundary layer. Your elevation helps mitigate that some. You’re also colder than DC usually. You also aren’t in an urban heat island. So I can see why where you are this doesn’t seem as dire.

I dunno my retirement options went from 3 to 1

Someone murdered the guy who was supposed to flip the switch on the were due switchboard.

I know I’m just being a smart arse. Trying to have some fun with this god awful state we’re in. Thing is it’s not that we have gone 8 years since a big snow season. For me the frustrating thing is that a lot of the years in between good ones are becoming total ratters. Since we spend 80-90% of the time not in those rare unicorn seasons it’s way more important Imo what the typical base state is in the interim periods. I would gladly give up some snow during those 1-2 good seasons in order to actually get closer to a respectable amount of snow during the other 8 years a decade.

You’re right. We should be discussing the pattern. Here…. that’s way less depressing

Here is an uplifting thought. The last 7 years have been so awful that even if DC has what would be a miraculous recovery and ends this season with 15” it would still need to average 26” over the next 3 seasons for the 10 year period to end up at DCAs already lowered and atrocious current 30 year avg of 14”.

Ya the not being a torch part is my main argument. The longwave pattern isn’t the problem it’s that the whole N American airmass is torched.

You’re making a straw man argument. No one has said it can’t snow. As a matter I’d fact a few posts up in this thread I literally said it will still snow and we will still get snowy seasons. But we are getting less. In the last 50 years DC has gone from averaging about 4 1”+ events per season to 2.5. They’ve gone from averaging about 18” to 14”. Their odds of a single digit snow season has doubled! Every metric has gone the same direction. Maybe in 5 years we change cycles and start some epic run but none of us can predict that. I’m simply basing this on what’s actually happening recently and now. But I don’t think you realize how big a hole were in. DC needs almost 20” this season just to avoid the last 7 years being the least snowy period ever! Let’s say DC ends this season with 10” and that’s optimistic and would be one of the best turn around for a season that started this way…then for DC to end a 10 year period back to its long term avg DC needs to avg 41” of snow the next 3 seasons! Even just to end 10 years back to the pathetic current lower avg (which wouldn’t even really refute my argument since the current 30 year avg is lower than the past) DC needs to avg 27” the next 3 seasons! I dunno man that seems like a huge hole to be expecting us to dig out. Seems more likely that at least for the near future the downward trend in snowfall continues. Even if DC gets 20” each of the next 3 years it will still end the 10 year period having lowered its snowfall average significantly under what was already a lowers avg from the last period.

It is warmer than it was 50/100/150 years ago. That’s not up for dispute. It’s just a fact. What’s disputable are 3 things. 1) How much of the cause is man (we don’t need to have that fight here it doesn’t matter to this discussion) 2) how much is cyclical 3) if it’s cyclical when will the cycle reverse But none of those things impacts my point. I’m not debating what snow climo will be 50 years from now. I’m debating what our snow climo is RIGHT NOW compared to the past. That’s more relevant because we base our expectations and forecasts on analogs and historical precedents. My point is right now we are in a warmer base state and it’s hurting our snow prospects right now compared to eras many of us use as the baseline for expectations. You might be right that 20 years from now things have flipped and it’s getting colder. I don’t agree but I can’t prove that’s wrong. But why does that even matter to what I’m saying?

Both those places have a colder climate. You can add a couple degrees and it would affect way less of their snow events. It might even help more than it hurts in their cases. Warming is causing increased snowfall in some places. But our area a larger % of the snow comes with temps very close to 32. Adding a couple degrees is more likely to hurt us. Additionally we get snow from boundary waves not arctic waves or lake affect. Very different. let’s simply state 2 facts. 1)It is getting warmer. 2) historically a lot of our snow fell with temps barely cold enough Those two facts when accepted together make this pretty obvious.

We have the PNA AO and EPA all good on the coldest week of the year. So of course we shouldn’t expect it to be cold enough to snow.

It's not that far off, yea this run of the euro totally lost the 50/50 so that part is not good but there is way more right than wrong with the picture

@Maestrobjwa its a long weekend next weekend...take off Friday and go chase the storm if you are that upset about it. There are healthier ways to cope.

wait don't answer that

Would it make things better if I threw a fit and jumped off the roof?

But the problem is the high pressure is only wrapped all around the top and not infused into the system like some winter storm turducken.

P30 then I retire from this game

If you do go up there, a few years ago at least, there were some little hills you could sled on near the Deep Creek Discovery center. The hill right in front of the building was ok and there was a hill behind the one parking lot a few hundred yards away. Also some trails you can walk around in the snow.

I agree...probably. But if it isn't...it might be towel throw time

ya we're on the same path...unfortunately it sucks. 0 stars on yelp.

He is right but isn't this symbiotic also. The 850 low, just like the low at all levels, is impacted by the thermal profile/boundary. One reason the 850 low ends up so far north on the op GFS is also related to the fact the cold boundary is so far north. If the thermal profile was colder I doubt the 850 ends up way up there given that synoptic progression.

But for there to be WAA precip ahead of any wave there has to be some mid level southerly flow! That's normal. If the mid level flow was from the north we would be smoking cirrus lol. The problem is the airmass just isn't cold enough for the equation we need to work out. It's that simple. We can debate the "why isn't it cold enough" but all this attempt to find flaws that just aren't there is annoying. Look at all this SE flow.... and it was absolutely sheeting snow at my house in VA at this time. Know what the difference was...it was cold. The equation worked there because the air mass was cold enough that even with the WAA at the mid levels the profile of the column when mixed was cold enough to support snow. Anytime we have a wave approaching us from the west there is going to be a southerly flow at the mid levels...and there HAS TO BE or else we wont get precip! I am also going to poke at this interpretation but let me be clear your not wrong, we just have different points of view of the same thing. A different spin. But I am NOT saying you're wrong. However, to play devils advocate here...the point of the blocking is to influence the track of mid latitude waves in the way we want, specifically to get one to track just under us and to foster there being higher pressure over the top of it as this happens. We have that here! In the micro sense our flow is determined by those local features like the low and high on either side of us. The "blocking" and "50/50" features are irrelevant once the dominoes have been set in motion and the storm is tracking by us. Our local flow is dominated by that low near VA beach NOT some feature 1000 miles away. Those features did their job to get the storm to VA beach. Now in this case we don't have an NAO block. But we do have a Hudson High and we both have discussed how that is the next best thing to an NAO block...historically its been the next best way to get a snowstorm absent an NAO block because it simulates much of the same longwave impacts on the mid latitudes near us. I used 1996 above because it was a product of a Hudson High NOT NAO blocking. The NAO blocking in December was actually mostly a fail in our area, although NW of DC did get several small snows out of it. We got more snow in Feb from true blocking...but the 2 snowstorms in early Jan were from a very similar pattern to right now. Jan 2016 was also a very similar, maybe even more similar despite the opposite enso to this weeks pattern (which maybe isnt shocking since we're in more of a super nino look than a nina). But the Hudson block does do its job. There is a perfect banana high over the top on the 12z GFS. I really don't get the "high is racing out" takes. As the system is reaching our area the high is bananad over the top of it. Yea once the low is up off MD and NJ the high is long gone, but that is normal. The high is going to have to retreat by that point but it shouldnt matter because once we are on the west side of the low the northerly flow behind the low should save us. But of course that doesn't matter if the airmass is crap all around us...that northerly flow is just taking warm air from just northeast of us into our area. Look at January 2000, where the high is by the time the low is to our latitude. Its long gone. But it didn't matter. I guess I am just saying why do we need to drill down to these super specific reasons why everything wasnt the exact perfect everything we needed when the real issue is pretty obvious to me...its just not cold enough. In a grand sense the whole airmass over all of north america just might not be cold enough for what we need to make this work no matter the fact that its a pretty freaking awesome synoptic setup and progression that if it was simply colder would lead to a snowstorm. I am NOT saying we have to get into the elephant in the room. We can not discuss or debate WHY its too warm. I am not trying to bring that into here. I said my peace with that over in the futility thread this morning. But whether you think its a right now problem or not...to me the only real problem with this setup is the whole airmass just isnt cold enough. Frankly even on the permutations where the storm cuts inland its not the synoptic setup thats flawed its just so warm the storm is able to meander inland in search of a thermal boundary to ride along. Had the airmass had any freaking cold at all it would take a more canonical track even in those worse cutter looks IMO given the longwave setup.

Except snow NW is supposed to be common in a good but flawed progression with some snow here. This gave us that solution with a damn near perfect synoptic progression. @WxUSAF was just thinking looking at the snow distribution from the Gfs it looks a lot like the early Dec 1992 storm. But that storm was early Dec not the coldest week of the year and the synoptic progression of that was way way worse with a storm that initially cut way west then formed a secondary basically right over DC. This simulated the same result as we got from a severely flawed setup early Dec out of a nearly perfect progression in mid January. Yay.