psuhoffman

Consult the chart

yes

I posted some of our biggest snows and busts side by side once with the date removed and no one could tell them apart. March 2001 was one of the busts. The setup is often the same between a big hit and a bust and luck with minor factors tip things one way or the other.

March 58

in fairness this is a setup where I feel a LOT better here than around DC

@mitchnick @Ji @stormtracker a random thought about the AIFS and all guidance in general. Yes the AIFS will still bounce around at range with details. Exact track. Intensity. It’s not a miracle. It’s performing better than everything else. Take that fwiw. However, over the last 72 hours the thing it keeps bouncing back to is a hecs lol. It goes one way or another but it’s now spit out 5 hecs runs over 72 hours. This is the default it keeps coming back too. That’s important. It’s not some random fluke run. It’s shown up over and over. Doesn’t mean it’s the only solution. But it’s not a crazy outlier permutation it’s a real possibility or at least AIFS things so. In general this is true also. Maybe not hecs but secs/MECS the guidance bounces bit keeps coming back to snow! There was only one other time this winter when the preponderance of evidence was for a storm. Jan 25. All the others we were rooting for the long shot permutations not the most likely. Some were decent shots. 30% maybe 40% but none had a preponderance suggesting yes this is happening. Thats it. That’s the observation. Doesn’t mean we snow. I do think this is our best shot of the season other than Jan 25 from 5 days out.

Look at some of the -pna snowstorms in the 60s. It can happen. Especially if that 50/50 and Hudson high combo verify. But yea what could go wrong is more likely because snow is never the most likely outcome unless it’s that rare -NAO El Niño situation.

Only

Ask him why he thinks it’s going to be warm

@Stormchaserchuck1 you can’t claim every non snow scenario as your win. Of course not snowing is the most likely outcome. There are a ton of permutations and most end in no snow. But you can’t say “it won’t snow because the storm will be too warm, or suppressed, it just miss us, or over amped and track NE. Well duh. Ya likely one or those lol. You mean it’s not likely all the multitude of things we need to go right to get snow will all happen. Nostradamus over here.

@mitchnick. FWIW all The ensembles think the bigger risk is an over amped miss to our NW

Euro trend last 24 hours. If it did keep this up maybe another 2 more equivalent shifts and it would be a hit.

Op euro did move in the right direction the last 12 hours but it’s taking baby steps and we’re gonna need a bigger jump here at some point.

Let’s see what the eps says. 18z it was still suggesting the euro op wasn’t necessarily the most likely outcome. EPS beats the op at this range still. But this is complicated. And our luck has sucked lately. But I’ve liked this threat window for a week now. It’s legit. But complicated and requires phasing. We sometimes win with that though and we’re due. I keep saying that. When is this we’re due index supposed to kick in??? @Bob Chill

Yea icon trended to a stronger wave 1 and suppressed wave 2. AIFS went in between. Ggem went the other way at 0z. But across guidance the weaker that Friday thing is the stronger the Sunday storm and vice versa. Which makes sense. Conservation of energy in a limited space and all that jazz.

Euro is more amplified and slower with the Friday/Saturday wave. The result is its suppressing the flow behind it and absorbs what is the next wave on other guidance

Ggem just came around. I’d wait a run to assume it’s settled on a final idea. All the guidance right now still has a healthy enough primary that we get a good snowstorm of not the HECS places east of us would get. There is time to see it adjust either way. My bigger fear is the primary trends dryer and it becomes a pure miller b which would carry the threat of a real screw job up here.

Now if they did happen can it go in my book? That is a very valid concern and odds favor a miss to the east in a Nina but not EVERY time goes that way, so we can’t just assume. But yes my biggest fear would be a weaker primary with a late bombing tightly wound miller b that crushes east of us. That’s the hecs MO for Nina

I was talking to @TSSN+ and @HighStakes earlier this evening and said March 58 was a decent analog in terms of the general setup. March 58 maxed out so don’t expect that. The issue with analogs is often the analog used was the max event for that type of pattern and 99/100 repeats of the same setup won’t reach that level or extreme. Although the potential exists if it went perfectly. A more likely outcome is always a less extreme version.

How’s the @Maestrobjwa storm coming along.

no one is forcing you to read the stuff you don't like

I didn't just use the numerical index, when I looked at each event I looked at the 5/3/1 days loading patterns and adjusted if the numerical index was obviously misleading. NAO had to be adjusted a lot when a block in the western NAO domain was cancelled out by heights in the eastern NAO domain which isn't relevant to our pattern as much. It would erroneously show up as a neutral or positive NAO when in fact there was an NAO block.

I can do that someday, not going to do that tonight lol. But the issue is ridges are becoming more significantly anomalous. So you won't see as many crazy anomalies in the past because they didn't exist as much. We are seeing more and more positive anomalies now...which yea makes it harder to overcome a hostile pacific...which is why we aren't snowing as much!

Correct I fixed it, we did have 15 snowstorms with 3 of 4 indexes hostile but none with all 4. Sorry...good catch

Edit.... my bad, I had an error that I just fixed. So... there were no warning events with all 4 indexes hostile...HOWEVER...there were 15 warning events with 3/4 of the indexes hostile. That is a significant amount of our snowfall! Additionally, historically the AO/NAO was more important that the pacific. We only had 18 warning snowstorms with a hostile AO/NAO help but we had 35 warning snowstorms with a hostile PNA pattern! This has flipped recently, in the last 10 years the pacific has dominated in a way that is not historically normal, and is very problematic because historically arctic pattersn driven by huge EPO/PNA ridges are NOT the way we get snowy pattersn, they are typically cold/dry patterns. Our snowiest patterns used to be -AO/NAO driven with a flawed pacific...this would direct pacific waves into the west and then would then run into the compressed flow over the east and be forced under us and it would be just cold enough to snow. Think 2010. That's our snow look. Not some huge EPO/PNA ridge where our flow is right off the arctic and its just cold...but dry because there are no pacific waves everything is diving down the backside of the eastern trough...we just saw what that typically looks like the last 3 weeks!