When I saw the weeklies this morning, it looked like we're losing the Jan 5-12 window, but Jan 12-19 (and later weeks) stayed cold. I was going to wait until 12z to say anything though.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think the Dec 29-Jan 5 window favors EC snowstorms (apart from lighter snows that don’t pop up in modeling until less than 5 days). But once the +PNA develops after Jan 5 (if it does), all bets are off.
Yep, that’s all we can take away at this moment. Jan 5-12 is still what I’m cautiously optimistic about, and the pattern still looks good after. There may be a couple/few days where we relax or warm up, but we have not lost this yet.
The 18z gfs wasn’t that bad. A “disaster” run would be a torch with 5 to 10 C 850s with a constant stream of western cutters.
This one always had the boundary close or just south of us with some shots at us. A couple of those shots were a bit warm, but at that range, it wouldn’t take much at all. 500s look good.
I don’t usually start paying attention to thermals until less than a week out. Models don’t do as good a job with low level temperatures compared to 500mb beyond a week. It’s a well known warm bias with the euro weeklies.
We do now have a few trackable events in the Jan 5-12 period (plus the NYD clipper). Even though they’re not showing what we want right now, there’s a lot of time for these to trend in our favor. It’s definitely not a shit the blinds pattern, but we need some luck on our side.
I can relate to that. I was on one of my work trips years back and I witnessed a 3’+ lake effect storm in western NY (an hour SW of buffalo). It was awesome, but it just didn’t have the same feeling of getting a home grown blizzard around here.
Hard to say. Warm ups have been getting muted as they get closer in time. Storm tracks get pushed south (like it did for NYC today). It's just too chaotic to get a handle on it all until we get inside 120 hours.