psuhoffman

FRINGED!!!

Oh lord....here we go, buckle up.

true We should have a "no holds barred" anything goes discussion thread and let all the malcontents have at it. It might be entertaining and we could contain the crazy to one place.

stop feeding his psychosis

That is the key imo also. Like I said earlier the only difference I could find in the one dud winter in the analog set most are using was a cold pool where the warm pool is in the north pacific. If that was enough to disrupt the pattern up in that area it could be why that winter went to crap compared to all the others. Get that Aleutian low with the corresponding epo ridge along with a strong stj coming in under it...split flow into the CONUS and were in good shape. Add in just a couple periods where the nao isnt hostile and we will probably do well. Assuming that idea doesn't fail I am very optimistic on this winter.

Philly only had 9.8" and NYC 11.8. Boston had 41.5 which is slightly above average but New England is a whole other climate animal I don't consider years where we have to get north of NYC to see significant differences to be a "close miss". 1995 was equally awful up here too btw so being inland in the mid Atlantic didn't help either.

If we throw out 2009/10 and 1994/5 as the high and low outliers we actually get a pretty consistent analog set ranging from a pretty median snowfall winter on the low end to a blockbuster on the high but definitely favoring above normal snowfall. Suffice it to say a repeat of 2009/10 with that kind of extreme blocking is highly unlikely. Wish it was as obvious what caused 1994/5 to be such a crappy outlier in a set of very good winters with similar conditions. I guess sometimes the weather just wants to weather.

The signal is pretty conflicting on that. It depends what you think is most important in terms of analogs. Of course if you include too many criteria and are too selective in how close a match you require you end up with no matches at all...or too limited a sample size to draw any meaningful conclusions. For instance 2002/3 is a pretty good match in some areas but a bad qbo and solar match. Some of the best matches in terms of location of enso forcing and the qbo are 1957/8, 1963/4, 1977/8, 1994/5. If we expand the criteria a bit more 1965/6, 1968/9, 1986/7, 2002/3, 2004/5, and 2009/10 are all somewhat close in some ways with at least enso and one other factor being "close". Of the 4 best matches IMO, 1957 and 1963 both had significant snowfall in December in Baltimore. 9.5 and 9.7". 1977 and 1994 had no appreciable snowfall before January. 58 and 64 were both blockbuster winters. 1978 recovered to be a much above normal snowfall season, 1995 was a dud. So 2/4 had snowfall in December. If we expand the analogs to get more possible matches the results are a bit more pessimistic for early season snow. We add 5 years but only 3 had snowfall before January, and 1968/9 it was only 4.1" and that came in mid November. December was snowless in 4/6 years with 2002 being the exception. Overall the expanded list gives us 4 years with significant snowfall in December and 6 years without. What sticks out to me is the all or nothing nature of snowfall in December in those years. It was either more then 9" or less then 1". So there seems to be a slightly increased risk of a big snowfall December but barring that a shutout is also an increased risk. There were no average type snowfall Decembers. So take that for what its worth. As for what that means for the winter 1966, 1978, and 1987 recovered from a bad start to be very good winters. 2005 bounced back from an awful start to be at least respectable. 1995 was the only total dud in the expanded analog list.

some are in midseason form already

Back to the one big thorn in the side of the analogs... in general all the BEST analogs to this year when looking at the current and expected patterns are pretty good in terms of snowfall. Except 1994-95. So looking at what might be the issue there, the only thing that sticks out is that in the fall of 1994 there was a huge cold blob where our warm blob in the north pacific is. I don't know if that alone was the difference between our good snowfall results in all the other modoki nino years with similar other pattern indices, but its the only thing that sticks out as vastly different from right now. Unfortunately I cannot find good SST maps going back to the other similar nino years in the 1950's 60's and 70's. More recently that warm/cold pool has been somewhat important in +QBO years. 2014 for instance. But 1995 was definitely too close a match in all the categories to right now to feel totally comfortable but perhaps it was just a fluke since the majority of winters following similar fall patterns to this year turned out very well for us.

I have not been paying attention to the CFS for probably the last 2-3 years but what you just said is part of why I stopped paying attention too it. It's one thing to be wrong, but I found it's often wrong in just crazy ways. It would have conflicting pattern signals and height patterns that were unlikely to actually verify, and usually wouldn't. In short it seemed to be crap. To be fair I don't put much stock into other seasonal climate models either. All of them have very low verification scores.

I don't doubt his base knowledge. He knows his stuff. The problem is I also know "enough" to know when he is full of bleep and I have caught him either exaggerating, hyping, or flat out misleading enough times that he has no credibility. So sometimes he has a point, and there are plenty of times when what he is saying is fine, but he is useless to many because unless you know when he is being honest or when he is hyping to make $$$ or fit a political agenda you cannot trust him.

I know there is a correlation with the QBO, but I am not so sure how useful it always is to predicting the winter. Everytime I have drilled down on the QBO for a specific winter I have found way too much contradicting signals to have much use. I do not know why this is, and I am not going to spend the time to figure it out right now. For instance not all blocking is equal for our snow chances. And if the QBO is more correlated to blocking in non winter months it would be less useful to a winter forecast. And perhaps there are specific combinations with other factors where it is more correlated. But... this is what is pertinent to THIS winter Taking all el nino years except the super nino years (they seem to be their own beast so taking out years like 1998 and 2016) and looking for similar QBO years where there was a phase change form east to west leading into it...we get 5 years. Here is how close they were and how they played out 1957-58 the phase change was in summer not fall and it ended up a blockbuster winter 1962-64 the phase change was in summer not fall and it ended up a blockbuster winter 1977-78 the phase change was in the fall, very similar qbo match to this year, ended up a good snow year 1987-88 the phase change was in summer not fall, ended up a mediocre snow year 1994-95 the phase change was in fall, very similar to this year, ended up a bad snow year So if we look at all 5 el ninos with somewhat similar QBO phase changes 2 were blockbuster winters, one was good, one was mediocre, and one sucked. If we look at only the 2 with a fall phase change, both were modoki, and one was good and one bad. But I have no idea if the phase change being in summer of fall even matters a lick. If we filter it by just the 4 modoki ninos that had a summer or fall phase change from east to west QBO then we have 2 great winters, one good, and one bad. So...I know the statistics that show the correlation between the qbo and blocking...but I don't see how that data is ominous in any way regarding our snow chances and the current el nino/qbo phases. I have done similar data research in past years and always found a similarly ambiguous or useless result regarding the QBO. Maybe someone smarter then me can tell me what I am missing but I have always found using purely the QBO to be too weak a correlation to snowfall for our location to be of much use.

I am not an expert on the MJO but there has been speculation from some mets that the combination of the warm central pacific and Indian Ocean combined with the cold near Australia would favor the cold phases of the MJO in the winter. JB has certainly been hitting on that as a major contributor to his winter forecast so take it with a grain of salt. Good to see other less biased sources saying similar though, might mean it has some cred.

Fixed I honestly have not even looked at the CFS

The years you posted had too varied results to say. Some of those were mediocre snowfall years and some were blockbusters. No real duds in the group though.

We should put you and vice in a room and let you have at it.

Add 5" to each zone, and extend the 15-25 zone a lot further southeast and that's my thinking.

You talking about the January 16 storm? Only 16"? I had about 30" but the coop in north Hanover reported 32" and the other 30". How did you get 16? If you mean the December 2009 storm yea I "only" had 17" here from that one.

About a week before we had a nor'easter that took a perfect track but was cold rain. I had some wet snow mixed in here. But it had been so warm it took a while to create enough cold over the Conus to allow a snowstorm. And from 10 days out it was iffy on guidance if it would be cold enough. But I do remember there were a couple runs from range that cut inland and I was telling people "look at the h5" that's not going to be the problem. Maybe lack of cold air but not a cutter.

You are both right. It's all nuance. Where you are a gradient pattern is way less likely to work then west of 95 so blocking is even more important. But blocking isn't all or nothing. And other things like stj and pna factor in. Too much blocking and things get suppressed. But that's kind of rare. Even if we have too much blocking it will break down and create a window as it does. As for the old PAC vs ATL debate...I think it's a draw. I've seen good threats screwed up by both. And I've seen us cash in with either a good Pacific and Atlantic when the other was crappy. But the one thing that clear, if you want a blockbuster storm then nao blocking is the way to go. It's very rare to get a hecs level event without blocking.

Great post. I love what I see in the Pacific. Where that Aleutian low wants to set up is money. We have time to get the atlantic right, and even if we don't if the pacific cooperates to the degree it looks like it might, we can do pretty darn good regardless.

Don't take the bait, he is just spewing nonsense.

We all realize you are decoupled from reality! How do you have time for all these posts? Shouldn't you be putting up sand bags to keep out the rising seas or or working on your tin foil hat to combat microwaves?

Westminster is at 760 feet downtown. Some of the neighborhoods on the east side of town are 800-900 feet. So you wouldn't see much difference. But I have seen significant differences between Westminster and my location around 1050 feet. A few that stick out in my mind there was a marginal temp event back in February 2013 where I had 4" of wet snow and Westminster had less then an inch. There was an event several years ago around April 1 where I had 3.5" and Westminster had nothing. The October storm in 2012 I had 8" and Westminster only had 3-4". There have been too many instances where I had 1-2" and Westminster had nothing to mention. It's less of a difference in mid winter with a cold storm but in marginal setups I do a lot better then Westminster.