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Everything posted by RitualOfTheTrout
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Its looking more and more like this season is only going to feature brief interludes of winter sandwiched between shutouts. Going to have to time something within one of those short windows I think. We keep getting "better-ish" looks on longer range but once we get closer in its not really a pattern change and after a few days we revert back to the base state. Would be nice to get a solid 2 week period of winter before January ends though, February Ninas are typically pretty bad. Looks like we have a small window upcoming Friday - Tuesday, maybe a little shortwave passes south of us Saturday night with some light snow. Its marginal temperature wise but its all we got right now.
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Maybe a shot at a rumble of thunder. If we can get enough instability for lighting that would be a pretty unusual. Something weather wise to shoot for I guess. In addition to the high moisture content, CAMs are suggesting the nose of very warm air at around 850mb will also result in some modest elevated CAPE with values of 100-200 J/kg. While this isn`t generally considered a large amount of instability, this is quite a bit for the month of January. This instability paired with high moisture content and deep lift will likely yield efficient rain rates with embedded convective segments that may contain lightning/thunder. How rare is lightning in early January? The 1988- 2017 lightning climatology dataset shows only 1 CG strike in Allegheny County in the first week of January for that period. So bottom line... lightning is quite uncommon this time of year.
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Just looking at how the pattern is evolving hard to imagine we don't make it into the top 5. Looks way above average until at least the 7th with no temperatures below freezing. After that it's a crap shoot, but I'm not sold things flip to a good look. Ensembles look to be delaying the flip, although it gets noisy and low skill past day 8-10 anyways and it might just be more of a timing / step down process muddying things. Other thing to note though is by second week of January you don't need anomalously cold air / perfect setup for something to pop up so not trying to spread doom and gloom.
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Yeah, no doubt snow with cold is awesome. I'd take less snow to have it fall in the low 20s and stick around for a couple days, especially this time of year with sun having little impact vs more snow that starts melting with temps rising above freezing before that last flake falls every time. Just my personal preference I guess, I know there are others that could care less about snow once it stops falling. Probably why I'm not as big into late feb and early march snow unless they are biggies.
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Already a light at the end of the tunnel though on the ENS. If you can see the end of the torch on the models before it starts there are worse places to be. Need to see it stick as we move forward in time but right now I think if in another 5 days it still looks to flip around the Jan 7th-8th period we can have a sigh of relief. No doubt it's going to be a gross mud galore period and is lasting a little longer than I thought it might I was however prepared for Winter to be pretty variable with patterns flipping back and forth throughout the season. I think the fact this cold shot looked to be longer lived and with a few snow chances mixed in when we were on the other side looking ahead doesn't help with the optics of the situation either.
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Hopefully, would be nice if some of the liquid models show is actually wet snow. I think the slower the low is to deepen the further east it makes it before cutting North so any trend in that should help us. Prior when it was a blizzard for Chicago the further west was better due to it already undergoing intense deepening.