michsnowfreak

when ensembles lose their active look i will worry. its definitely going to get colder. question is who benefits from the snow?

rain has turned to snow here. it looks to be snowing heavily in Ann Arbor.

i have read that the models are struggling mightily as they always do when a pattern is changing.

ensembles are all over the place. it definitely looks more active, so individual op runs are worthless. Also more cold air will be available later in January. Doesn't guarantee who does well and who doesnt, but I don't think we see April like snow systems like the one ongoing for a while. Feb may actually be our best month of the winter.

I always think ensembles are the way to go once you're more than a few days out

I had planned to take my annual trip North in mid February but I may push it back to late February. Not sure yet I am going to monitor the weather but the snow depths up North right now are unreal. I cannot recall such low depths up there, I am sure it's happened before but not in my recollection. A friend went snowmobiling in Grand Marais last week and looked like there was maybe 4-5" snowpack which means tons of dirt on the trails. That should be one of the snowiest areas of the upper peninsula and they should have several feet on the ground by now. Supposedly paradise only has a few inches which blows my mind. Pattern definitely looks to be changing but it will be interesting to see how much and how fast they can catch up. I was in Munising a few years ago when they had near 50" depths. The current snow depth there right now is 5".

I remember in early March 2015 we were abnormally dry on the drought monitor with well over a foot of glacier on the ground.

The next week looks to have "unsettled weather" but I am still looking the last week of January for the best hit of Winter of the season so far, or at least since Christmas.

If you were in Detroit you would freak out this Winter lol. December actually did have 3 good east side snowfalls, nothing major but they were enjoyable...but since its been zzzzz and it has been cloudy almost every day the last month and a half with about 3 or 4 exceptions.

Again I want to know where their map comes from. This is the weeklies 30 day 2m temp anomaly. 850mb look colder. And again...this is week 3-6 aka low skill anyway

Bamwx is interesting. They like to berate day 14 of the GFS when it's not accurate (which of course it usually won't be) but theyre using a 6 week out low skill weekly. But what I really can't figure out is I have weatherbell and that is not what it shows for the 30 day anomaly on the weeklies. It isn't nearly that warm

I guess it all depends. My neighbors and I are always striking up conversations with each other. Since the deep south is filled with a lot of outdated bigotry I've always assumed the hospitality bit is just a cover.

This is another example of why I like snow cover. I've seen double the snowfall you've seen this season yet yours locked into place ahead of this ridiculously boring pattern, while I've had bare ground with these overcast days where the high and low are a few degrees apart. Its been a very mild start to January but mainly because of the low temps.

lol midwesterners are known as being friendly. If you think they are not, id stay away from the east and west coasts if I were you

Another interesting thing i notice about anomalies in ensembles and weeklies is that 850mb temps are colder relative to avg than 2m temps. Maybe a sign that lower diurnal ranges (& hopefully unsettled weather) will continue as it turns colder?

Weeklies actually had a cold end to Jan (week 3) before a mild first half of Feb (week 4-5) then cooling towards average (week 6). That said we've been told many times that weeklies accuracy plummets after week 3.

I use https://xmacis.rcc-acis.org. It is an awesome tool you can play around with it all day to find what you want lol.

Several people have noted that big storm potential seems elevated in February. It would not surprise me in the least if we get slammed. Does not necessarily make up for all this downtime though. If you like wire-to-wire Winter theres nothing that can save this zzz period. if you just like a good storm or active strerch tere is tons of time left for that.

Lol I know, my brother lives in Chicago (Lincoln park). On Christmas Eve about 20 minutes after it started snowing here he said, this is already more snow than I have seen all season in Chicago, lol. December actually saw average snowfall here but it was entirely synoptic. It is just strange that we usually manage to get mood flakes and squalls from the lake but we have not gotten any yet this season. The actual west MI snow belts are having a near record slow start to the season. Yet who's getting the non synoptic snow? Chicago is, from airplanes and smokestacks

This is so weird that Chicago keeps getting snowflakes from smokestacks and airplanes but yet were not getting any flakes from Lake Michigan.

Avg high/low Dec 1 is 41/29 and Mar 1 is 40/24. But obviously you are heading in different directions going into December versus going into March. There have been stretches over the course of the climate record where December has been a very wintry month but for the most part January and February are harsher Winter months than December. In recent years February seems to be the go to month for lots of snow.

impatience is all around, but a pattern change and pattern shakeup is imminent. The details are unknown, but its definitely a wintrier, more active look then the complete zzzz thats been in place at least a week. With the dead of Winter approaching I looked up snowcover as a metric to see when the highest percentage of time with snow on the ground was for Detroit. The highest likelihood of having snow on the ground is January 6th to February 17th, with the best time, aka the dead of Winter, being January 25th to February 3rd. Interestingly it's almost 3 times as likely to have snow on the ground on March 1st as it is on December 1st.

This is a totally theoretical statement....but for some snow weenies....let's say the month period from Jan 20 to Feb 20 ended up with a temp departure of -3° and snowfall at 75% of average. Many would say, "so much for a pattern change". Lets say it ended up at +1° with snowfall 150% of avg, they would say "awesome pattern change". A more wintry change seems near imminent, but in the end it will be the amount of active wintry weather that defines it.

lucky. I have 2 glacier piles remaining and that's it. sounds like slippery sledding pack.

Without even looking up the totals I see some awful winters for the midwest. Some ok ones too though. Detroit has now fallen below avg on the season (14.5 vs 14.9 avg to date). hopefully that changes by late month.