psuhoffman

Unfortunately it was sponsored by a Nigerian prince and is currently under embargo due to an unfortunate technicality with his treasury. He told me if you wire me 10k he can clear it up and he will send you a million dollars and release the images!

Ya we are talking about the same thing just using different terminology

That’s realistically what we’re rooting for in a cold enso. There were two examples in 50 years with more than one significant snow. 1996 and 2014. Those were unicorn fluke season. For the rest of the cold enso we hope to get lucky one time. March 99, Jan 2000, Feb 2006, Jan 2011, March 2018 it can happen. If we don’t get that one lucky hit then it’s probably gonna be a total dud like 2008, 2012, 2017, 2023

The scoreboard right now is kinda my point...we've been in a TNH EPO driven cold pattern since Thanksgiving and we have absolutely nothing to show for it outside the higher elevations. We have to get the trough axis further west and some STJ injected into the pattern or its likely to be more of the same.

Obviously this is my bias but it wasn't really that good up here... But this is where I am coming from. In the last 30 years there have been 17 cold enso seasons. In those seasons I have had 17 snowstorms of 8" or more. So we are not talking about some super rare thing here, it's not impossible. And I checked, all of these also featured accumulating snowfall into the DC/Balt area and most of the were warning level there also! So this is what we are looking for, and it doesn't look all that different from what we look for in a warm enso...the fact is to get a 8" snowstorm we need the same things whether its a nino or a nina, its just harder to get in a nina so it happens less often...but not NEVER just less. So my point is, we need to hope we get a transient nino look and luck into a snowstorm during that because that is how we get snowstorms in a nina, not typically from a TNH EPO pattern, those are cold/dry most of the time.

Feb 2006, the lead up to the storm that dropped 10-20" across the area. Probably our second best cold enso snowstorm of the last 30 years.

Everyone is free to root for what they want. Keep in mind we have different situations...where you are actually has a significantly better chance of getting lucky in a EPO TNH pattern than 95 west. So some of what I am about to say is very specific to 95 west... but no thank you on the TNH EPO thing...because its damn near impossible to get a snowstorm in those patterns here and I root for snowstorms not pity flakes. That is me, everyone is free to be happy with some mood flakes, but for me its snowstorm or bust. I don't mean HECS, a 6" storm can be fine also, but I am not in this game to track 1-2" naissance events. Frankly if you tell me now that I will get 12" the rest of this winter and it will all come 1-2" at a time, I would say forget it I would rather just get shut out and not waste my time worrying about it and move on with my life. 2023 when I got absolutely no snow was much less frustrating to me than 2009 when I got 20" but it all came 1" at a time and I was left wanting to punch cute woodland creatures by the end of the year. So I will take my chances with the Nino split flow look, because thats how I actually get snowstorms. Just because it's getting warmer does not mean suddenly there is some other path to getting real snowstorms...if it gets too warm for that to work it will just mean we dont get snowstorms anymore. But I am not rooting for the wrong pattern just because the right one might not work anymore...I'll keep banging my head into that wall until its proven that we've warmed too much for it to work...and at that point I will check out completely and not look at all anymore same as I would if I lived in Florida in winter.

Of course...we have had snowstorms in a nina, and most of them have some STJ influence. It's really hard for us to get a significant snow here from a pure NS wave. It's just, unfortunately, not nearly as common in a nina, but not impossible. Here is an example. One of our best cold enso snowstorms of this century. It was a hybrid of a digging NS wave phasing with a STJ wave.

Let’s hope the extended guidance isn’t correct. Yes it’s a cold look but assuming those day 20-30 looks are correct I don’t like the long wave configuration at all to get a meaningful snowstorm. Maybe a clipper or a weak wave but there is no STJ and the trough axis is too far east to amplify a NS wave in time. It would be a frustrating pattern imo. Let’s hope the day 15 is correct and it doesn’t roll forward to that.

My thought process in ignoring the extended guidance is that over the last several years they’ve had a tendency to want to revert the pattern to a generic enso look almost immediately so that by the end of week 3 they always look like whatever the mean composite for the current enso is. That’s not been working out so well though and twice recently it completely busted when those products wanted to establish a canonical Nino pattern. Will that day 15 Nino look immediately progress towards a classic Nina pattern by day 20, maybe. But based on recent performance and trends I’m not assuming so.

That is more Nina, but I'll be honest I'm not wasting much time on the extended post ensemble guidance, the skill beyond week 3 is so low it's really just for fun. But the genesis of the January pattern is now within range on the end of the ensembles. This is the look that had my interest on the EPS and its been there for a few runs...GEPS also...a little less so on GEFS but I think its just slower to get to it. This is more so a nino pacific look, along with the correlated Atlantic side blocking and a split flow across N Amer. This would be a rare look in a cold enso season. But enso has not been as reliable lately so who knows. I am not making any definitive calls on anything yet, this is all way way way out there...but I've taken heat for pretty much debbing on everything this season so far...so I thought it was worth it to say this is the first time I've seen anything that at least peaked my interest and made me take a second look.

One thing I find "interesting" is the guidance right now for early January has more of a nino than nina look. Take that for what it's worth...something to keep an eye on as it get's closer. If we can get the high latitudes to cooperate and even just some STJ involved it would increase the potential significantly.

Fair enough. I get it. I miss the good old days when we had winters where I could spend a lot of the time doing analysis of a specific legit threat rather than looking at day 15 height anomalies and saying “still sucks”. All I’ll say is this….keep in mind I’m actually still too optimistic. Trolling would be if I intentionally was making things worse than they are. But I can’t remember the last time I said some pattern sucked or it wasn’t gonna snow and then it did. But I can remember multiple examples in the last 5 years where I said I was exciter and thought we had a good chance and it didn’t snow. I still over predict snow.

I’ll try, but most of the time I’m not trolling it’s just whatever statistics or historical analysis I’m giving is so awful it seems like trolling. That’s just our reality though lol.

Legit question not trying to fight trying to learn. The correlation to cold is legitimate, however doesn’t it depend on the mid latitude long wave pattern across North America? That cold does not necessarily have to get directed here, and so how do you factor in that part of the equation? Thanks.

It’s the coldest 35 degrees ever

In return from Revelstoke on the 4th so the timing checks out. Euro 15 day snowfall…there are still some rooms available at the lodge lol

Yea, unfortunately we’ve seen numerous times recently that when Canada torches we just can’t overcome it even when we do get lucky with a perfect track wave. Best case scenario is when the pac jet starts to retract we get enough cross polar flow to replenish our cold source quickly. Worst case would be we don’t and we waste 1-2 weeks of a better long wave pattern with unworkable temps then by the time it’s getting cold enough the pattern is breaking down. We’ve seen that story a few times lately also. The winter might break based on that variable.

It's rushing it, I don't get back until the 4th

Because temps are almost always a problem now, we tend to simply focus on getting cold...but if you look back at historical records it might shock people to see how many below normal temp months had little to no snowfall around here.

Coating. Still snowing. 32

Chill I'm at 4". That crazy disparity between here and your area happened one time in the 20 years I've been up here. Yes I will almost always get more snow but it's almost never 400% more like that. That was a very rare one time type thing. Now, if we start to see that kind of thing happening regularly during "good patterns" because the boundary temps just arent cold enough to support snow in lower elevations that would be a huge problem. But so far to that extreme it's only happened once really ever.

This

I made some vague comments that are being taken in various directions so I feel like maybe I should clarify. First of all my analysis was not based purely on models, my post of the GEFS the other day was purely to illustrate a very specific point I was making that despite an opposite pacific to what we kinda expected, we might end up with a similar result in terms of the north american temp profile. But I did also say that look is a problem because it can take a week or two to recover from that if we do torch our source regions like that. I am in 100% agreement with others that we likely still get a window in January. But my pessimism is that our legit window for snowfall might be getting really narrow here. Based on all the analogs I identified I fully expect the pattern to get rough for snowfall sometime in the second half of January and probably persist through February. Unfortunately that is in incredibly strong consistent signal across weak nina and most cold neutral enso years. So losing a week or two during the window climo says we had the best opportunity to snow is a big hit to our chances to overperform this season. There are goalposts to a winters potential and I used a formula to predict snowfall based on what I thought were the middle of those goalposts. But of course the possibility to get the higher end of that range of possible outcomes is there and I am rooting for that. Not seeing any legit high probability snowfall threats in the next 10 days and a possible moderation that would take us into January after makes me feel like our chances at overperforming expectations this winter is probably slipping away. I am not saying we will get no snow, sorry if any of my posts came off that way. We also could luck into something during the rough period. We got a 2-4" snowfall in February 2018 during the middle of a horrible torch pattern when we got lucky with a trailing wave behind a pressing cold airmass. But if we have no snow heading into January, and its likely we flip to a bad pattern by January 15-20th...our window to get much snow this winter is pretty small. That's all I'm saying. But this was expected...we knew this was not likely to be a good winter. Things are about what I expected but maybe I was rooting to be pleasantly surprised.

How do the ensemble snow probabilities look?