michsnowfreak

if its 1-2° above avg with lots of storms, there will be plenty to track

There have only been 2 cases in the US of a person getting it a second time. it's starting to seem like people are just coming under the assumption that everybody's just going to get it, open crap up.

I'm in the 127% club too

For sure. It's funny I saw the Marquette national weather service Facebook page lighting up with people posting pictures of a few scrawny snowflakes hitting their windshield, even though they live in a place that gets well in excess of 100" of snow per year. The same people that mock downstate for having traffic issues in an 8 or 10" snowstorm posting close up shots of wet slush on their windshields. Does not matter how old you get, theres always extreme excitement in the 1st snowflakes.

I literally just mentioned yesterday that i stay out of this thread for the most part but I have to comment on our presidents theatrics again today. He is already back to down playing it, telling how the flu is worse and of course not wearing a mask. I find it amusing that our obese 74 yr old president caught his hoax virus so bad that he had to be taken to a hospital with round the clock care & oxygen and now a few days later he has recovered to feel "better than hes felt in 20 years". Even though most younger healthy people who catch a much more mild form feel effects of the virus for 2 weeks. I started symptoms before trump, never had anything close to needing oxygen or hospitalisation, and yet I still feel blah, tired, and slightly feverish.

2007-08 averaged exactly normal here temperature wise but is the 5th snowiest Winter on record. The Winter featured some huge rollercoasters including watching a foot of snow disappear in a day a few days before Christmas and a warm spell in January that gave us just about as warm a January day as we can ever get (wasn't officially the warmest, but it was up there). Patterns that are so volatile like that seem to keep feeding storms.

The NDJFMA period averaged 2.3° warmer here in 2019-20 than in 2018-19, yet we saw over a foot more snowfall in 2019-20. That's just the most recent example, and I'm 42N. Not sure how far south these things realistically happen but regardless people need to be very careful to not just jump to a quick conclusion when they see a bunch of orange or red on a map, at least before looking at the grid lol

Thank you! I look forward to that as well!

I agree. a classic la nina is stormy here in the lakes but I cant count on anything as the weather does what it wants. In fact every fall it's the same thing, it's fun to look at forecasts and speculate but we know it's full of unknowns

Euro doesn't look great but I don't consider +1-1.5C a blowtorch. As always it's gonna come down to storminess and if la nina lives up to its name there should be fun times.

If you want to talk verbatim, remember plus 1 to 1.5ﾟC is the departure of +1.8 to +2.7°F. That's nothing for northern areas.

Decent winter. good on snowcover but there were a few thaws. This was a good storm, broke the big snowstorm drought of the '30s-50s.

I suppose I could take a blend of all 3 as well, but it's crazy how different my take in Michigan is compared to yours in New York. 95-96... Horrible screw zone. Cold and dry. Great if you like to ice fish 05-06... The definition of front loaded. Lots of snow from Thanksgiving to Christmas. A mild mess after New Year's. 07-08... Stormy, stormy, stormy with tons of snow.

Amazing comparison shots.

Same in southern Michigan. Seems like it's going to be an early peak everywhere. Haven't done any peeping yet but took a few pictures while out and about yesterday (see attached). Just a month ago I was planning a possible trip to Connecticut the 3rd week of October. Now that looks like it will be late almost everywhere. Taking a trip to northern Michigan the 1st week of October, hope that's not too late. Despite the drought, my brother is reporting some decent color showing up in Connecticut, not all dull as feared.

My memory of that specific storm is kind of vague since I personally was never on the wintry side of it, but wasn't that the storm where they were predicting an epic ice storm for some areas that just did not materialize? Dont remember the snow aspect. We ended up with very heavy rain which ended as freezing rain then a dusting of snow.

this is an interesting take since the modeled October outlook is sort of the opposite....warmer than average west and near average to possibly below average east. But who knows....seasonal forecasting is tough.

My brother said the color is popping in Willimantic, sent me a picture, looked pretty good although it was just one picture so I can't dismiss the idea of a less than stellar color season there. Color exploding here in Southern Michigan, I'm thinking a vibrant peak that will be about a week earlier than average.

That was crazy lol. It was apparent early on that totals were going to bust big, but rather than change the advisory to a warning they just kept upping the accumulation forecast.

Actually that's not too difficult for DTX or GRR because of how much they love the old "Winter weather advisory" . We had at least one, maybe 2 of those busts last Winter alone. But in a great Winter we would see many more. I notice that GRR as the worst. 1 to 3" of Lake effect snow? They issue a Winter weather advisory. 5 to 8" of synoptic snow? Winter weather advisory lol

You always have a way with words lol. I guess I could say the snow season is getting longer, not winter. But I mean...if youre saying that autumn and spring snows are increasing in frequency, i wouldn't think of it any other way than an extended snow season. Mild to warm winter patterns still produce many snow chances north of 40N. Then again...I don't necessarily agree with your entire assessment anyway so we can agree to disagree. Despite very minimal warming here locally during winter, I wouldn't call anything a trend. Less than 10 years ago we were in a stretch of very heavy snowfall during the winter months but unusually paltry Novembers. Yes the past handful of years have seen some impressive early and late snows but I wouldn't call anything a trend yet. I think some attribute far too much to climate change when it comes to the ever changing weather.

So actually one way of looking at your thoughts is that winters in the North will just be getting longer. If we're having unusually early and late cold snaps with snow, that's prolonging the season. In the middle of Winter, even mild and unfavorable patterns are still good for snowfalls in the North, just not solid retention.

It's all about settling & compacting. We actually tend to get a lot of powder here, of course we get some fluff and some heavy wet snow too. Everyone talks about how quickly the lake effect fluff settles, and it's very true, but powder does the same thing. You can have 3" of powder on the ground that has more density than a fluff pack, so let's say the next day is cloudy and dry, you might lose hardly any of that depth. But let's say the next day has another 3" of powder, your depth may only finish that 2nd day at 4 to 5" rather than 6", it just now has more water content. But if that was a wet 3" of snow on the ground, you can bet your depth would be 6". I'll go up to the snow belt of northern Michigan in February when they had months of 40:1 lake effect fluff compacted into one heavy slab of snow. The depth might be 3' with a 5 or 6" water content. No matter how much snow is on the ground when it's powder on powder it always compacts. That is why the 2' snowpack in 2014 was so impressive here. It was like walking in ice cold quicksand. I'm a big guy and got stuck in a chest high drift that I had a hard time getting out of when I decided to venture off. The heavy water content of East Coast snows makes a huge difference.

how many winters have you been in Milwaukee?

November was thanks to the 9.2" snowstorm on November 11th. The fact that record cold followed it created beautiful scenes. You had a nice deep powder snow pack, glistening, crunching and frozen, with a few trees clinging to unusually late fall color. I always look at a Winter as a whole, not individual events, but that was a lot of fun. 2006-07 managed to just eclipse 30", and 2015-16 only saw 35.5" at Detroit but some northern suburbs eclipsed 50, just mattered where you lived. 2009-10 was not a bad Winter at all, but it was nothing memorable like it was in the mid Atlantic. El nino is very hit-and-miss, and la ninas arent ALL roses (remember, 2011-12 was one)...but overall if you want to gamble you would take a la Nina any day over an El nino here.