psuhoffman

~10" if you include the sleet but the depth ended up around 8 after compaction. I know technically that gets recorded as 10" but it feels cheap since the depth never got above around 8.

Taking the kids skiing this weekend...right now leaning towards Snowshoe. Has to be an Ikon pass resort and the New England options look too brutally cold this weekend for the little ones. And the PA options (blue and camelback) are too dangerous. BTW....sidebar... I know its probably because its so close to NYC and NJ but my god those pocono resorts....I won't go anymore... they don't even attempt to stop aggressive out of control dangerous skiers. One almost ran over my 7 year old going full speed straight down the slow skiing beginner run and when I yelled slow down gave me the finger and yelled F you...a ski patroller was 50 feet away and I went to him and he said "what do you want me to do"....how about your fucking job! They don't see to care. Maybe, unfortunately, someone needs to get seriously hurt and the mountain get sued...I know they have some liability protection but not if it can be proven they were guilty of neglect.

at the time you said that I was thinking..."one of these upcoming weak arse waves will probably get us at least an inch" but I was wrong it looks like. I just thought...no way we go 2 weeks this cold and don't get any snow at all but that looks likely now. You were right! Even going back before my time up here using the local coop data...looking at past 10+ day periods of consistent cold like this we always saw at least some days with minor snow accumulations... multiple days with like .5, .8, 1.1 things like that...I can't find a single stretch with below freezing temps like this and zero snowfall for 10 days.

What has amazed me is the lack of minor events during the latest cold period. Usually up here, and one of the things I like most about this location, is when it's legitimately cold we are almost guaranteed to at least get minor events. An inch or two from a clipper, a cold front, a lake effect band that makes it... in over 20 years up here I can't remember another significant stretch this cold that was completely totally dry like this without even those minor nickel and dime events.

We didn’t strike out. We did get one really good storm. But one of these years we need to actually get lucky and max out one of these good patterns with potential. We’re way way way past due. Maybe it does happen this year still. We have this shot around PD and I suspect we get another shot sometime after also.

It’s called a joke Chuck. People respect your opinions. The reason you are “doom and gloom” is you’re usually right and the truth of where we live is usually it’s not going to snow. Even more so the last 9 years! I do hope we don’t waste our chance at a snowy winter. We need 1-2 more decent snow events this year to feel like we really took advantage of what’s been a rare -AO winter. If things ended now most would end up below avg snowfall which is a shame given the potential.

It's a legit threat. Not all longwave patterns are created equal. Not all -PNA's are created equal. A -PNA pattern without any blocking and a scorched N America with no cold air anywhere is never going to work, and that is what we've had when we've had a -PNA most of the time lately. A -PNA with blocking and a N America covered in snow and cold air left over could possibly work. Yes it will be a warmer pattern, yea any wave COULD end up rain...but at least there will be waves coming at us and room for them to amplify.

@Chris78 @CAPE we did need the pattern to relax some... the amount of blocking we had along with the +PNA -EPO was causing extreme suppression. The one significant precipitation event we've had in the last month came during a temporary -PNA. And this is not uncommon. I've said before that when I looked at every single 5"+ Baltimore snowstorm the majority of them did not come in frigid arctic regimes. And it becomes even more apparent if you just look at the 10"+ storms. There are several reasons for this. Big storms ride the thermal boundary and that means they are usually along the rain/snow line...not in the middle of an arctic airmass! We have to be somewhat near the warmth to win OR there has to be a wave amplifying enough to press the warm boundary back towards us! Waves don't amplify in a cold NW flow regime! There are some rare examples of super cold storms, we got one last week, but it requires so many rare things to time up perfectly...if that is the only way we get big snowstorms we would be in big big trouble. A lot of our big snowstorms came during periods that weren't that cold. Feb 83, Feb 87, Jan 2000, Feb 2006, Feb 2010, Jan 2011, Feb 2014, March 2015, Jan 2016 all came during periods that weren't arctic cold right around the time of the storm and most of them we even had to worry if it would even be cold enough! Way way way more of our big snowstorms come during "just cold enough" regimes not during our craziest coldest arctic airmasses. Those tend to be dry. We can luck our way into a frontal wave or weaker snow...smaller snowstorms are more common in these cold periods...and we've been perhaps unlucky not to get at least some of those during this latest period...but our true big snowstorms usually come during less cold periods. What's been especially frustrating over the last 10 years is a lot of the patterns that historically would provide us with chances of snowstorms...not cold but should be "just cold enough with a good track" ended up just too warm and when a perfect track system came alone it ended up a perfect track rainstorm. But that doesn't change the equation. It's been so long since we had a big region wide snowstorm during a pattern like Feb 2006 or Feb 2010 that it seems some are starting to think we need some big EPO/PNA ridge induced arctic airmass to get a big snowstorm but that's never been our typical path to a big snow. Most of our big snowstorms came during blocking regimes with a split flow under it and no arctic air anywhere (no NS to FCK up the flow) and some juiced up STJ wave came along with the perfect track and it was just barely cold enough to snow.

we had a blizzard what would have been presidents weekend 1958 but the holiday was still called Washington’s Birthday then.

If you think the lack of a blockbuster rare huge snowstorm Feb 20-28 is not just the product of a random chance distribution of a rare event over a limited sample then explain the causation. Finding some pattern in numbers means absolutely nothing if you can’t show there is causality and it’s not just an artifact or randomness.

Persistence works more than 50% but it’s not enough to just rely on it. just off my head these winters featured significant pattern shifts and storm track changes 1993, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2022

Where the warmest anomalies are changes exactly how the pattern sets up. A more west based Nino places the tropical forcing closer to the dateline which is where we want it. That tends to correlate with a trough southwest of Alaska...the downstream impacts of which are good for us. An east based nino shifts the whole pattern further east and often we see the north pacific trough end up too close to the Pacific NW which floods the CONUS with pac puke. We need that to be pulled back some.

Sometimes a QPF pattern persists all season...sometimes not. Remember 2015, Everyone thought we were toast when all those snows hit north of us through January and early Feb...then it became our turn from Feb 15 into March. That was maybe the most extreme example but it's hit or miss whether the a pattern persists the whole cold season...the problem with using persistence is it works until it doesn't and it's hard to predict when the pattern is going to change until it does.

The latest CANSIPS was indicating a possible modoki nino. That would increase our chances significantly.

It's true that we will lose the deep constant cold and enter a more variable period...but so long as we have blocking in February or March there is the threat of a snowstorm.

can we really call it a jackpot?

The humidity might rise slightly for a time.

Tracking clouds

So much here…We almost get a snowstorm 48 hours after this. On aigfs we do. And it’s the long range gfs.

There are some similarities to 2018 only in this case the TPV was weaker to begin with and the warming is happening about a week earlier. Obviously we will need luck to go our way...but if we got a similar pattern to March 2018 and got it to set in 7-10 days earlier AND with a colder N American profile to start... I would roll the dice with that.

Might take the kids to snowshoe

90% of our winters end in disappointment. March snow has nothing to do with it.

PD is a different date each year. Baltimore had a top 20 snow on Feb 19th. That’s layer than PD 90% of the time. So now we’re just talking 8 days? Yes there hasn’t been a too 20 event from Feb 20-28. But there have been big snows after that. It’s a fluke. If anything it means we’re due to get a storm that week! There are so many weeks without a top 20 snowstorm. They are so rare and some weeks have 3 of them meaning there are many weeks with none. The last week of December. The first week of January. January 9-21 have none! Why don’t you obsess about those? you do this with lots of things. You seem to try to assign meaning to randomness. The fact a super rare event hasn’t happened in the 140 years of records that one week is just a product of random chance. There are several other weeks without a big snow and I promise you if we had records that went back far enough you’d see that storms can happen those weeks and this is just random chance over a limited period of time.

A March 2018 is possible. If we could start the cycle a week earlier and get a little more luck in our area could be good. That month was so so so close to epic and we got about as unlucky as possible to only get one decent snow that month.

3 of Baltimores 17 biggest snowstorms came in March. Baltimore has had snows of 22”, 16” and 13” in March. And 2 years ago I ran the numbers and showed that Baltimores odds of getting a 4”, 8” and 12” Storm peak the first week of February but then only decrease slightly until you get to the 3rd week of March when they drop off a cliff. You say this every year. Every single year. And one proven it’s false like 3 times and you still say it. Why?