4 minutes ago, wolfie09 said:

New map..

Jumped up a full inch lol

Yeah I was about to post this. For WNY, this went from a major event with a strong chance of significant residence time in the Buffalo metro to a mediocre LES event mostly limited to southern Erie County that would probably merit two stars out of five — at best — on the KBUF storm summary.

Getting five inches of paste just in time for Christmas morning was nice, but I’m just about ready to move on.

3 hours ago, Thinksnow18 said:

Where do you live W? Amherst? I think anyone south of that line scores tomorrow am... anywhere north of that good luck.

Near UB South Campus. When I can get onto the roof, I’ll be putting up my Weatherflow Tempest and share the wunderground ID here. We’re basically a little over three miles due west from the NWS office at the airport. Thankfully we’re not far enough west to completely lose a lake connection. Basically if a band moves north enough to hit Snyder or the western edge of the village of Williamsville, then we are under it. My older neighbors said that they got hit hard in 1985, 2001, and the October storm, so a sustained lake storm is possible but rare.

14 minutes ago, wolfie09 said:

Only using for trends (even global models can be useful lol)

You can see the"heaviest" shifted south (expanded) as well as the southern fringes..

Regression to the mean axis. One of these years we’ll get another long-duration event for the metro & near northtowns.

19 minutes ago, BuffaloWeather said:

1.3" in the last hour 4.9" total so far.

We’re up to 3.5”, pure paste. I was up late assembling a dollhouse for my three year old. She loves snow, and is going to think that this is just what happens on Christmas. 

20 minutes ago, Geez150 said:

I knew it would take it to the ground. What a shame.

Ugh, condolences. I remember when the November 2014 snowpack in the south towns vanished like a fart in the wind, but mid December snow should have more staying power.

1 hour ago, SouthBuffaloSteve said:

I think that was the storm he gave up early on and went to bed and missed the band camping out over SB WS.  We had 3-4”/hr rates.  

My mother in law lives in Gardenville and even not counting November 2014, they’ve had several long duration events since I moved to the area in 2012. 
 

I think this is case of the grass being greener on the other side. WS has had maybe half of the big events in Hamburg, and a quarter of the big events in Springville, but areas further north from WS haven’t seen anything close to what WS has gotten. Naturally, the further you get from the axis of the most common wind direction, the less chances you’ll have for lake effect. Nobody is due anything! 

3 hours ago, Thinksnow18 said:

Yeah looking at the models this morning I thing our chances of a big event in the metro have gone away. The synoptic looks like our bigger snowfall out of the 2 events. In fact this map would almost make this a west/nw wind judging by the heaviest accumulation near Erie PA...what a change

Yeah this is expected but still disappointing. The probability of long duration LES events for the metro/northtowns is constrained by the calendar (between the time that sufficiently cold air is far enough south to result in snow formation but before the lake shuts down), but also by the rarity of atmospheric conditions that create a stable SW flow. Timing has to be perfect. It’s catching lightning in a bottle. And what seems to happen is that an early signal of a major event for the metro gets our hopes up until we get closer to the event and better sampling data makes it clear that one of the components won’t be there.

I have to remember that we won’t know with certainty that we will have a major metro event until the second foot starts falling.

27 minutes ago, BuffaloWeather said:

Analogs for Fri-Sun LES event. I'd favor a Westerly flow at this moment. 

http://www.eas.slu.edu/CIPS/ANALOG/DFHR.php?reg=EC&fhr=F120&rundt=2020122100&map=thbCOOP72

Yeah I’m not seeing the metro analogs that I had hoped to see, but January 2014 was a pretty good storm for the metro (a blizzard warning for all of Erie County, and 12”+ up to Eggertsville and Snyder), despite a partly frozen lake. The cold was brutal, with high winds dropping the wind chill down to -20.

But it was a huge event off Ontario. Didn’t Watertown get multiple feet? I remember feeling jealous that they got much more snow off an almost identical flow as Buffalo. The Ontario band meandered as well — this one really walloped the Tug.

https://www.weather.gov/buf/lake1314_stormg.html

16 hours ago, lakeeffectkid383 said:

Yeah 00z is even better because winds back more SW than previous runs as the storm ends up tracking a little further west along that front as it moves into Canada. Would be a few days of nice SW slow after the storm riding the front drops several inches. Would definitley be a white Xmas for most. 
 

I couldn’t care less about the storm along the front, give me a few days of a WSW to SW flow and I’d be thrilled even if I’m not in the bullseye. 

The return interval of that true SW flow long duration event is well over a decade. There hasn’t been one with a stable SW flow resulting from a slow moving James Bay low in the time since I moved to WNY in 2012, and maybe not since October 2006 (though my understanding is that it was an early season meteorological outlier that saw bands curving northward from a more westerly flow) or Christmas 2001 before that)

.

So based just on probability, I wouldn’t expect this to be a SW flow Buffalo/Watertown event. But I would be happy to be wrong.

1 hour ago, rochesterdave said:

You’re crazy. I hope you’re also right. Lol

He’s not right about much, but he’s got to be batting around .750 when it comes to LES pattern recognition in the Rochester area. Far better than anyone at KBUF or broadcast mets.

5 minutes ago, BuffaloWeather said:

GFS

Congrats Williamsport and Montoursville

9 hours ago, DeltaT13 said:

This is actually a decent point. I’m willing to bet money I’ve had hangovers that are an order of magnitude worse than the side effects from the vaccine. Not concerned about it at all. 

My brother is in the Moderna trial. First dosage he felt a little achy and tired the next day, but felt fine by the morning after that. He’s pretty sure he got the actual vaccine, partly because of side effects but mostly because he had two extended periods of exposure to COVID positive coworkers in a relatively confined space about six weeks apart. The more recent exposure involved a arrogant fool of a coworker who had removed his mask for about 30 minutes with his back turned to my brother and two colleagues. The two colleagues both developed symptoms within days, and one of them was hospitalized for over a month. My brother was in quarantine but went to be tested three times over two weeks, and was negative all three times. He also had antibody testing, but the trial protocol won’t reveal those results to him.

I’m sold. Sign me up.

1 hour ago, SnowLover22 said:

what is your point. For all you know they could have lived another year or 5 years or even 10 years. The fact of the matter is Covid shortened their lives and that sucks. Why does it matter that they would have died eventually from heart disease. 

This pandemic has really brought the eugenicists out of the closet.

3 hours ago, fujiwara79 said:

Those 2020 numbers are based on UN projections and do not include impacts from COVID-19.  That disclaimer is written at the top of the page where it’s sourced from.  I understand you’re a full blown denier but at least read the sources that you reference from.

I’ve seen this same misleading statistic cited on Facebook and Twitter. The context is always removed. Out of curiously I tried to track it back to a source. It should surprise no one that like-minded denialists create and retweet/share this stuff and amplify it so much that it’s difficult to determine who was the first person to misrepresent and share it. A few times members of this site have shared similarly misleading data points — sometimes about COVID, sometimes about election fraud — and have been laughed at.

So it’s possible that he shared the UN data without knowing that he had zero credibility. But why don’t people ask simple questions — is the information current, is the information relevant, is the source authoritative, is the information presented in context, and most importantly, what is the purpose of the information and the point of view of the source ? It’s a basic test of the legitimacy and reliability of information, and this stuff fails that test much of the time, because it isn’t produced to inform but to mislead. Asking “whose interests does this serve” is critically important.

4 hours ago, SouthBuffaloSteve said:

Rules for Thee... Not for Me!

 

I don’t like Cuomo, but Artvoice has turned out a lot of BS and disinformation since its few reputable journalists started a different weekly. 

51 minutes ago, BuffaloWeather said:

Positivity rate back up today. Our county led all of NYS in confirmed cases. Worldometers said 933 cases yesterday in Erie county. 2nd place was Suffolk with 651

With UB students gone until the end of January, a chunk of regular tests and higher than average positivity rate and new cases will be taken out of Erie County’s numbers. I expect a small but significant drop in those metrics. It will probably have limited affect on hospitalizations, as college age COVID cases are a far greater risk to others than to themselves, and their interactions with non-students are generally limited to food service and retail workers and to a lesser extent the police who have to break up their superspreading parties.

19 minutes ago, TugHillMatt said:

When it comes down to it, many Americans love our rights to free enterprise...and it is something I love about our country. The ability to support one another through our businesses is such a fantastic thing. I wish there were some who understood that these local business owners are grasping at straws to stay afloat. One political part of Covid that is really boosting the Socialist agenda is the push to control these businesses. I fear that the next couple of years could see  a demise of the amazing free enterprise that has shaped American culture and communities. This raising money for him is proof that many people do not want that to happen.

This argument just lost an election, but go off

30 minutes ago, MJO812 said:

NY Company Makes Cuomo Window Stickers to Keep Eye on Thanksgiving

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/ny-company-makes-cuomo-window-stickers-to-keep-eye-on-thanksgiving/2736532/

Are you in Patrol Services? I think you mentioned you were assigned to a precinct. I’m curious to know if patrol officers are being given specific orders on enforcement of pandemic regulations, or if it’s just another case of politicians leaving cops guessing about what their role is assumed to be.

18 hours ago, wolfie09 said:

Hey man I understand your gripe lol I'm obviously a little different since I grew up in NYC and have a slight connection to the cuomo family.. Everyone is allowed to have their opinion and I respect it!!

At least his dad, for his flaws, cared about regular people. Andrew Cuomo represents one group of elites who are hated by another group of elites. Both groups of elites have support from regular people who think you only get two choices, but never fool yourself into thinking that any of them give a damn about us. Cuomo’s nursing home regulations were directly responsible for many deaths of vulnerable people, and for numerous employees of homes. It’s unforgivable and minimally the consequences should be that he leaves office in disgrace.

2 hours ago, BuffaloWeather said:

Wow, we're definitely going red on Wednesday.

Ironbound is a pretty awesome historical Portuguese neighborhood in the eastern part of Newark, with traditional bars and restaurants that people visit from all over the NY/NJ region. Sad to hear that it’s the locus of an outbreak.

3 hours ago, BuffaloWeather said:

Hoping we have a similar recovery next year. 

When a single case pops up, China tests every person in that city. Positive tests are required to isolate, and are monitored for the quarantine period, with severe penalties for non-compliance. It’s undeniably effective, but it’s not something that people in western countries, which political traditions that elevate personal liberty over obligations to society (to greater or lesser degrees, depending on the country). Countries that have more restrictions also tend to have governments that provide direct support to people who are inevitably economically harmed by both outbreaks and shutdowns. The US has opted to pursue an approach with fewer restrictions, more outbreaks, and less assistance to individuals.

Extreme restrictions and mass testing have allowed China to largely resume business as usual. Our government does not have that degree of power to compel its citizens to behave in certain ways, so we have the individual freedom to do things that increase both our personal risks and the risks to others on our communities. So I don’t think we will have that sort of turnaround until we have either an effective vaccination program or sufficient cases that we get true herd immunity. (Though the risk of the “let it run its course” approach, unlike an ongoing vaccination system, is that fading natural immune response and viral mutations ignite another pandemic.)

48 minutes ago, brentrich said:

Yes, it's going to happen. Just wait. 

Look, while I think the best way to get this under control is 15 -20 days of real lockdown, there are powerful people who exploit ignorance, stubbornness, and antipathy to discourage individuals from doing things that are inarguably in everyone’s interest. Biden can make a proclamation of a national lockdown, but many people won’t care, and others will actually do the opposite because polarization is a well developed and highly effective strategy for a small elite to maintain their wealth and power.

The best we can hope for, frankly, is that whatever local or state lockdowns that happen are effective enough to make people in places ruled by leaders who oppose lockdowns understand that they don’t have to let loved ones suffocate to death with no family or friends to comfort them. Watching governors who have made all kind of anti-mask statements fold like a hold em player with a 2-7 offsuit hand gives you a sense of how this might happen.

2 hours ago, BuffaloWeather said:

Not really something fishy, but the accuracy of the vote is pretty sad. Every vote doesn't matter if you dont truly count every vote. How do you just lose 2700 votes? What if something like this happened in a larger populated district? 

Well, from what I have been reading, when ballots were tabulated by hand (as recently as 2012), the average miscount in an election — votes counted wrong or not at all — was around 1.4%. That rate would have represented about 65,000 votes this year in Georgia alone, and those were generally not addressed unless the margin of the election was within a 0.5% recount threshold. This paper explains the above very clearly and gives much more detail than I can: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4852/299c36ad9ffab0e18bfa077cb7b4ad3493af.pdf.

Keep in mind that Trump didn’t gain 2600 votes from the recount — he gained 800 or so votes, because the 2600 votes split something like 1700 for Trump and 900 for Biden. And an update earlier today showed that 78 of the counties in Georgia completed audits/recounts. 57 of them had zero changes. 21 came out one vote off.  

We have a dumb voting system designed to be cumbersome for voters and to allow for a lot more error than we settle for anywhere else. I’d be annoyed if they didn’t count my vote on the first attempt to count, but this is a case of Hanlon’s razor — “never attribute to malice that which is better explained by incompetence.”

6 hours ago, BuffaloWeather said:

Does not matter to me. That is some fishy stuff going on, how do you just lose nearly 3k votes? They should honestly be auditing every single states votes to make sure every voice is heard. 

I have been reading about this because I wondered the same thing. The process of compiling ballots and recording vote tallies is called vote canvassing, and has always had inherent error rates. Recount and audit thresholds are around 0.5 percent because that threshold considerably exceeds the average counting error of electronic vote canvassing. At precinct or district or county level, electronic voting has dramatically reduced the error rate of vote canvasses, but the problem is that the inevitable errors that creep into electronic vote canvasses tend to be much larger than hand ballot counting errors. 
 

To explain it succinctly, there are fewer errors in counting ballots by machine than by hand counting, but the errors tend to be much larger in scale. The 2600 found ballots represents a level of error equivalent to about 5 ballots in 10000. Hand counts yield a much higher error rate, but the thing with human error is that instances are distributed randomly, and the chances that one campaign would net enough votes to change the result is extremely unlikely unless the race is far closer than this one. The recount in Wisconsin in 2016 yielded a change of Trump’s lead of 131 votes, increasing his lead of 0.77% to a lead of 0.7701%. Absolutely minuscule.

In Georgia, those 2600 votes netted about 800 votes for Trump, about 6% of Biden’s lead. That seems like a lot until you realize that there would have to be about 19 errors like that for Trump to take a lead — a systematic bias so unlikely that it would almost certainly demonstrate fraud.

But despite the Trump campaign’s attempt to uncover fraud, there is absolutely no evidence for it. Trump and his proxies have made a lot of public claims about actual fraud, but whenever they have had the opportunity to put those claims before an actual judge, they back down and make it clear that they have no evidence, and ask for relief from the court for something other than fraud, because the sanctions for getting in front of a judge and making demonstrably false claims are very serious. 

So... there’s nothing at all that implies anything fishy is going on, and in fact it’s growing more obvious by the day that the Trump strategy is to use unwarranted claims of fraud to push the argument that the remedy is to throw out legitimate ballots of hundreds of thousands of actual voters who cast votes in good faith following the correct process to vote. Anyone who doesn’t see the danger of that  has warped their brains with the dumbest forms of politics.
 

2 hours ago, CNY_WX said:

And where has he been since the election?  It looks like he’s completely checked out at a time where the country needs leadership.

I don’t think he has completely checked out. To his credit, he’s pushing hard to get US troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, although it looks like he’ll settle for pulling out only some of the troops while claiming he ended the wars, but going for a headline over substance is pretty much the way he is about everything. There’s also a story going around that he’s going to punish pharma for not delivering an approved vaccine before Election Day by eliminating the drug pricing structure that guarantees that the US government pays more for medicine through Medicare than any other country. Occasionally, Trump has done the right thing, but it always seems to be for a really bad reason. But for the most part, he’s raging because he lost, and doesn’t care who suffers. He’s a whiny p*ssbaby, and I wouldn’t care about it except for the fact that he’s forcing most of the Republican Party into taking a position that their political opponents are categorically illegitimate and have absolutely no right to rule. That’s how autocracy works, and it’s about as antithetical to what the US has thought of as its ideals since it was founded.