tamarack

1 hour ago, Chrisrotary12 said:

Heard a bird this morning that my brain associates with spring. We’re on to Morch! #NoChanges

Little black-and-whites are still calling chick-a-dee-dee, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear the almost-spring phee-bee this weekend.

3rd straight sunny day with a sharp breeze, thanks to the low that may still be burying some places in the Maritimes.

On 2/4/2024 at 8:02 AM, WinterWolf said:

Estcourt Station.   It’s ironic that they call it the Big Twenty Township..when it only incorporates two townships lol.  Estcourt Station has like 4 people, that is one remote area. 

Twp20/Range11&12.  That combo is probably the biggest township in Maine.  (Not town - that's Allagash, comprised of 4 townships.)  My first winter (1976) working for Seven Islands included several nights at the Woodlands Improvement camps in E. Station while maintaining boundary lines.
When I want to know the coldest temp in Maine, I look up 04741.  Also, that 80" was found near the center of Big Twenty, about 12 hours after the end of a big dump - 29.0" at CAR and 26.5" (greatest I've measured, also deepest pack at 65") at our Fort Kent home.

7 hours ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

1983-1984 wasn't that great of a winter...1998-1999 sucked, but that was a strong La Niña, which I doubt next year.

83-84 was a bit better in northern Maine - 171" and the most massive pack I've seen.  Reached 80" on Big Twenty Twp (northern tip of the state) in mid-March.

4 hours ago, ChangeofSeasonsWX said:

I still find it hard to believe that PVD got 7.0" on May 9-10, 1977. I can't even imagine what that much snow would look like with fully leafed green trees. Not even October 2011 produced even close to that much snow around here. I wonder what the return period is for May 1977. Probably like a 500 year event.

What's really strange is that PVD's 7" was more than 5 times the 1.3" at BDL.

I think there was a major controversy at BWI for that storm. They were clearing every hour or something like that. Same thing happened at BOS too…BOS real total was prob more like 23” instead of the “record” 27.6”. 

Yea, 1978 is still king...those were all total depth measurements, too.

Both storms started with 3" depth at Boston.  1978 raised the pack to 29" while PDII brought it only to 19".   'Nuf said.

17 minutes ago, WinterWolf said:

Lol so we both missed it(PDII).  

Neither of the PDs produced a single flake where I was living at the time - suppression city.

15 minutes ago, FXWX said:

I would always rather play the odds with suppression than pattern dominated by strong southern stream...   

Even with the major suppression in 2002-03 and the horror of 2009-10 here, I totally agree.  One plus for this very mild winter is that it's been active.

1 hour ago, ORH_wxman said:

So the problem is snowfall is not a normal distribution. It has a high tail because of the fact we can’t have negative numbers on snowfall. 
 

So the easiest way to exclude outliers equally in a fast/crude manner is to put your entire array of values in a column on excel (you prob already did this)….now go to “formulas” tab on the top of the spreadsheet and go to the drop-down menu that says “more functions” and then go to “statistical” and then scroll all the way down to “Percentile.exc”. Once you do that it’s going to ask you select the array of values, so click on the first value of your snowfall total, hold shift, and then select the last value so that it includes all of them in the array.

Now, below the array line there is a “K” value. For your 10th percentile value, type in “0.1” and you should see a low-ish snowfall value appear below the K line on the right. That is your 10th percentile snowfall value…write it down or type it someonewhere . Now do the same thing for 90th by inputing “0.9” for the K value. 
 

Once you have have your 10th and 90th percentile values, you can toss all values above the 90th and below the 10th if you want to exclude outliers in an even manner. This gets rid of the problem of trying to use methods you’d normally use for a normal distribution. 
 

Now you could do this for any percentile value you wanted. If you wanted the 50th percentile, you type in 0.5 into the K line…for 25th you input 0.25….you get the idea. 

I'm lazy.  I'd merely sort from high to low, note n (looks like 113 since 97-02 are msg) and excise the top/bottom 11 of the column.
(I also like the median in accounting for outliers.  Doesn't always work, Jan snow here has the median 1.6" above the mean.)

January in the Maine foothills:

Avg temp:   19.8    +4.6
Avg max:     28.1    Mildest, 43 on the 10th
Avg min:      11.5    Coldest, -12 on the 19th

Precip:    5.47"    +2.16" and 0.01" behind 2nd wettest.  Greatest day, 2.18" on the 10th

Snow:   29.9"    +8.5" and identical to Jan 2023.  Biggest day, 9.0" on the 10th (followed by 0.84" RA, making an awful mess)
Depth:   Max:  20" on several days   
              Avg:  13.7"   +1.7"

This month was well AN for temp, precip and snow.  It featured 5 significant snowfalls ranging from 3.8" to 9.0".  The 1.0" squall on the 14th
was one of the best since we left Fort Kent in 1985.
The powerful storms on the 10th and 13th that pounded to coast did little damage here other than clogging the snowblower, as winds were modest in each.

15 hours ago, dryslot said:

36.70" on the season, Avg is 75", Will we get there? I ave my doubt's.

Snowfall here averages almost exactly the same for NDJ as FMA.  Thru last winter the average total is 88.6", with 44.2" thru 1/31 and 44.4" afterwards.  If that pattern holds for this winter (and at your place), you'll finish very slightly BN.
(This should be taken with a barrel of salt.  In the 2005-06 ratter, only 15% of the total came after 1/31.  The next winter, it was 80% post-January.)

1 hour ago, Damage In Tolland said:

Well you and I agree. Look at all the posts after mine that don’t care about December snow lol. Point remains.A snowy December is needed for a great winter 

In our 25 Decembers, 14 have been below the average and 9 led to BN winters.  Only 9" on 12/31/2000 prevented 6-of-15 AN as that winter had 150% of the average here.  While nearly 2/3 of BN Decembers have been part of BN winters here, the ones that were in AN winters are not rare.

34 minutes ago, Damage In Tolland said:

I think we are just talking about different things . I’m mainly referring to the talk that in December we don’t normally get much snow. And then the next sentence says something like” Jan and Feb are our Climo friendly time of year to get snow.. so I’m fine with punting December”.. It’s that line  of thinking that is like nails on a chalkboard. No Timmy it doesn’t work like that lol .. 

Said almost no one.  Crummy Decembers usually lead to BN snow for the whole season, but it's not 100%.  Panic and/or giving up on winter when December snow is lacking seems silly.

Too far north here, only 0.5" while Manchester 25 miles to my south had 4".  That half inch likely means the month finishes with 29.9", exactly like Jan 2023.

Forecast has been edging things north over the past 2 days.  GYX' POP from the most recent 3 forecast periods here went from 30% to 50%, now 70%.

1 hour ago, tunafish said:

I'm at 15 obs with measurable, surprisingly close to your 17.  Are those daily cocorahs obs, or another, more frequent increment?

I've done my daily obs at 9 PM since moving to Fort Kent in 1/1/76, and the above numbers are for those 24-hour periods.  (Prior to that, at NNJ and BGR, I observed at midnight.  Given my forester job's schedule demanding wake-up at 5-5:30, I moved the obs time in favor of more sleep.)   
When I joined cocorahs in August of 2009, I merely added the 7 AM obs, not wishing to abandon 33 years of the evening obs.

34 minutes ago, tunafish said:

Interesting / sad statistic I realized today:

I take the obs for PWM;  new snowfall is called in every 6 hours.

This season, I have more Trace observations (22) than I do inches of snow (19").

 

That's a lot of 'T' obs.  I've only had 9, plus 17 with measurable snow.  (Avg winter here has 25 'T's and 42 with 0.1"+.)

1 hour ago, Ginx snewx said:

8 years ago today final 29.5. Post your first FB memory of the Blizzard of 15

My first memory was disappointment.  We'd planned to drive home from SNJ on the 27th but decided it was wiser to stay an extra day with the grandkids.  They had never seen a snowstorm greater than 7-8" and the forecast there was 12-16, starting in the evening of the 26th.  Instead, first flakes came about 7 AM, lasted until 11 and the 1.5" total was gone by 3 PM.  The grandkids were more disappointed than I was.
When we got home about 6 PM on 1/28, we found 20" of 9:1 sand in our driveway, very difficult to slog thru as the consistency tended to twist and slide away from our feet.  Pics and descriptions from neighbors plus other data were convincing that our home had "seen" full blizzard criteria; we've had that only 4 times in our 25+ winters here.  Had we been home, that storm would've been the most powerful January blizzard I'd ever experienced, with only Jan 19-20, 1961 even coming close.  (And 18 days later came the VD massacre - 24 hours before game time the forecast was 18-24; we got 1.5.)

15 hours ago, Damage In Tolland said:

Did DC leaf out today? 

They had about the same temp as where my wife is visiting her sister, just north from Ocala.  

3.8" with 0.40" LE yesterday, at 31-32°.  More like a March 26 event than Jan 26.

4 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

Another 3" here to go with the 3.3" today?  Lots better than the total whiff that's been progged before today.

Measured 3.3" from 0.26" LE at 12:30.  Still snowing with very small flakes but it's likely that the 12:30 depth is as tall as it will get, though the ratio will suffer.  Forecast at 7 this morning was 2-4, looked later and it was revised to 3-5, probably when the day crew looked at the radar and now-casted.  Either way, it verified here.

Had 3" from 7:30 to 10:30, nice moist feathers, little since but radar shows another patch of decent precip - hope it's white.

3 hours ago, weatherwiz said:

What a horrific week. My mom passed away early Tuesday morning (though there is some solace in that it was in her sleep...it was getting to the point where she was starting to get uncomfortable with not being able to breathe) and then not even 24 hours later, the step-mom to my older siblings and who was essentially like a second mom to my and my two younger siblings passed away too. 

Horrific for sure, not one but two huge losses.  May you stay strong through this trial.
The bolded reminded me of my mom, years ago.  At age 55 she was diagnosed with emphysema, thanks to 40 years of 2-3 packs/day.  She quit cold turkey, but over the next 15 years her lung function gradually failed, the final 18 months on O2 24/7.  In the last months she felt that she could never get a full breath of air.  Her two non-smoking sisters lived into their 90s.

Current GYX forecast says "cloudy", storm goes like Bass and Norwood.

0.2" ice on the snowboard, only 0.1" on the twigs.  Currently mostly sunny, so the trees should shed later this AM.  Used a goodly amount of ashes on the driveway and stairs.

2 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

1958 stayed great almost to the end. The big dog HECS was around the equinox. 

Had 18" of windblown powder Feb 15-16, then 24" paste bomb March 20-21 at our NNJ home.  March 56 thru Feb 61 in NNJ had more big snows than any other place I've lived.

2 hours ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

Slant sticker

Adds about 1/25".  Horrors!