michsnowfreak

Gfs ensembles seem SE of their op

Looks good at this lead time. But still an eternity to get there.

At this point I would take a couple inches of snow blowing and drifting everywhere in a heart beat ala December.

We've had multiple days of flurries in January but have not had snow on the ground since December 29th. I'm going through withdrawals. Shit winters, and especially shit Winter months, happen from time to time but it sucks. This is why I get irritated when people complain about little things like the models overdoing it or snow rates or whatever during average to above average snow seasons. It was nitpicking and after so many snowy winters an average snow season was unacceptable. Welp....NOW is the time to complain!

You may lose a few inches of depth but the rain will actually help solidify it with the coming cold.

With a handful of traces and only a dusting of snow in January, the last day with 1" of snow on the ground was December 29th. Technically not THAT long ago but it seems like an absolute eternity. So glad the light is finally at the end of the tunnel, hopefully the colder pattern produces for us all.

All the models/ensembles show an active and colder look finally inching closer.

I never knew palm tree weather was temps around 15°F. Learn something new every day!

I'm not feeling this one for Detroit. I think we will get some of the following ones. Just my gut instinct though, as we all know nothing is certain until show time.

The saturation is definitely turned up though, no one's grass is that green in January.

The week around Christmas was great but other than that its been a frustrating Winter here. This shit winter aside, the Midwest does just fine with snow. After many excellent winters in the 2000s-2010s, a snow weenie thinks an average Winter is bad, so it's no surprise so many lose it in an actual bad winter. Snowfall averages have increased in much of the Great Lakes, including outside the snowbelts. I know very little about the mid Atlantic climo but I just cannot attribute their record snow drought to anything other than bad luck. Especially when almost any given year you hear about a snowstorm hitting a warm climate place that rarely sees snow.

The long range certainly has an active look for this region. Hopefully something pans out for us all.

I like your new pic lol

Admittedly I'm not always the best at remembering what type of event any given snowfall was. I remember the amount, but not always what it was. But this is actually an interesting topic because I too have noticed we don't seem to get as many clippers as we used to in the 1990s, but we get a lot more snow now than we did back then too. Back then they were our bread-and-butter and now they just make occasional appearances. And cyclone mentioned icing. Back in the 1940s and 1950s we had way more ice storms amd glazing events than we do now, but way less snow.

You prompted me to look it up for Detroit as this is a stat I've never looked up lol. As you can see, plenty of 0.1s since the records began. Of course every season also has dozens of traces. 1880s- 70 1890s- 62 1900s- 74 1910s- 74 1920s- 76 1930s- 73 1940s- 60 1950s- 75 1960s- 83 1970s- 81 1980s- 64 1990s- 43 2000s- 68 2010s- 72

It's ironic that you say, "people use stats in misleading ways all the time, whether intentionally or not" when one of your biggest soap boxes is to use the period of record that is BY FAR Chicago's coldest of the entire climate record as the baseline (and you often make that even colder than numbers indicate). But I just want to know where you are getting this idea that dustings didn't count in the old days lol. I mean there's literally zero proof of that, not to mention as myself and hoosier already pointed out, since records started there have been 0.1" snowfalls. Actually, some of the oldest weatherbooks are fascinating to look at if you ever take a trip to the NWS. They would put detailed narratives of the weather.

I disagree on that as there are plenty of 0.1" and 0.2" snowfall measurements since the beginning of record. Now, you can argue that any given event may have only dropped a trace in the city but 0.2" where ORD is. (We see that all the time in Southeast Michigan with lake effect remnants, differences over short distances). But if the observation site has 0.1" of snow they recorded it at 0.1" of snow

Not to derail the thread but back-to-back flips are actually fairly common for any given area. But I can't think of anything more dramatic than the flip Detroit saw many many years ago: 1880-81: 93.6" 1881-82: 13.2" 1880-81 still stands as the 13th coldest Winter on record and for over a century stood as the snowiest Winter on record until 94.9" in 2013-14 dethroned it. That is the Winter that Laura Ingalls Wilder's book "the long Winter" was about and you see those pictures of trains in the Dakota's buried in snow. 1881-82: This Winter stands as the 2nd least snowy on record, only 0.3" off #1. But more impressively its by far the warmest Winter on record. The 2nd warmest winter is 1.2° colder. Usually rankings in top 20 lists for long term climate sites are separated by tenths of degrees if that.

Looking in all the data, it really does show how some of your storm tracks are just favoring a certain area. Obviously Minneapolis should beat Detroit more often than not seeing as though they average about 7 more inches, And Detroit recently had a good stretch where they beat Minneapolis 9 out of 15 times from 2002-03 to 2016-17. But what's really surprising is there's quite a few years where one city beats the other by 20+ inches.

Hoosier, it's probably quicker for you to figure this out lol, what is the greatest difference in a snow season between Chicago and Minneapolis each way? For Detroit... 1982-83: MSP 74.4", DTW 20.0" 2004-05: MSP 25.5", DTW 63.8"

We've had some good snow storms the past few years, but of course most of them start with model porn before hitting reality. Honestly I'd much rather get a bowling ball system than any kind of cutting storm

Not sure what kind of phone camera you have, but whenever that happens that's a great time to get pictures of snowflakes. I have the Samsung Galaxy S21 and it's awesome for that

I never said Winter's gone as advertised. A mild, gross January pattern was seen way back when we were shivering on Christmas. It became clear there was no avoiding it. I'm just glad the light at the end of the tunnel is finally showing.

Im not trying to polish anything. The mild first half to two thirds of January was well advertised. I mean there's really nothing you can do but wait it out.

I said the cold was coming back before new years? Wow that's news to me