Juliancolton

I just drove down to Peekskill and never encountered any slickness, just impregnable fog almost all the way down the Taconic... which of courses gives everyone the right to straddle the middle stripe and slam on their brakes at will.

Anyone else check out Eaglefest in Croton today? The weather held out and I didn't have much on the agenda for the morning, so I went for the first time. What struck me was how of all the raptors being exhibited, the one that least excited me was probably the bald eagles since I see them so often on winter hikes nowadays. Seems like just yesterday it was national news when the first baby eagle was born in the Hudson River watershed after the environmental remediation... now they're almost as ubiquitous as seagulls in some spots. What an awesome effort that was and continues to be.

Yeah, a step above mood flakes here. Build up that pack...!

I still call it the TZ out of habit and because people lose their ever-loving minds if you don't, but I think a lot of us get too worked up over the silly name change. Almost nobody calls local river crossings by their official names... if someone told you they were debating whether it's quickest to use the Hamilton Fish Bridge, the FDR Bridge, or the George Clinton Memorial Bridge to get to the Thruway, you'd look at them like they were a lunatic. That said, sometimes the new names catch on relatively quickly after construction of a new span, like how the Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, SC became almost universally referred to as the Arthur Ravenel Bridge in under a decade. We may well be jumping across the ol' Cuomo before the 2020s are through.

The trouble started about three hours after the quake, so seems unlikely

TZB closed in both directions for what sounds like as near as makes no difference to a pileup. Rough times are upon us in the HV

USGS has it M2.2 at 6.2km deep. Basically no chance of feeling that up here, but still cool to see. Maybe foreshock of something more substantial?

I'm beginning to suspect that 100" may be out of reach this season.

2.0" total melted down to 0.08" liquid, 25:1. Nice.

The Tidbits snow map for the NAM is terrible given the thermal profiles. That starts as sleet and quickly flips to cold rain for the remainder of the event. Looks like it's on crack in any event but I remain wary of that warm punch in general.

The NAM meanwhile leaves the door open for this to be the bigger of the two snowfalls...

The good news is I'm at just a hair under 2" so far from this morning's burst of snow! First wholesale positive bust of the year. The stuff is basically translucent, so I'm expecting extremely high ratios once the contents of the Stratus melt down. The bad news is I caught a hidden patch of ice on the way back in from measuring and ate it big-time. WG, I think most of this is dPVA-driven from a shortwave zipping along in the zonal flow... you can see it well on the WV loop this am. I can't really think of any major implications this might have on tomorrow's system. The sensible conditions have thrown a lot of us for a loop, but the upper-level wave looks about the same as modeled. We just got lucky with slightly more moisture in the column than anticipated, which wouldn't have even been noticed if not for a well-placed DGZ and a tenuous trigger for ascent.

Yeah, nice appetizer, mod snow atm. Looks pretty.

Last night's snow goes into the books as 1.3" melted down to .34", so under 4:1... only a marginally better ratio than sleet. I guess the back and forth p-types led to rain falling into the slush and adding to the moisture content.

Yeah, morale is low... we need something to break in our favor. We're treading ever deeper into "sh** or get off the pot" territory with this winter.

Looks like the HRRR would be 2-3" late tonight. Cut that in half per standard HRRR protocol and it's a nice ground whitener.

The better eclipse by far for around here is under a year away in late January 2019, so all is well. The supermoon business is a bunch of malarkey... even the most trained eye can't tell the difference between the moon at perigee and average distance.

This was probably the smart choice. I was out of bed by 4 to meet up with some photog friends along the river. We could appreciate the novelty of it but I wouldn't be able to convince anyone that they missed out on something special by sleeping in.

Brutal

Got a nice but brief view of the partial eclipse this morning. You could really see a chunk of the Moon getting blotted out just as it was setting.

I got .3". Seems like eastern areas did quite well overnight.

Gradient patterns are overrated. If it fails you torch and rain. At least in a cold pattern you still have cold even if it doesn't snow.

I was telling some of my other weather friends that my New Year's resolution was to only call models by their actual names and not by their parent agencies or places of origin (like the "Euro" is officially the Integrated Forecast System, the UKMET is the Unified Model, the JMA is the Global Spectral Model, the Australian is the ACCESS, etc). It lasted about six hours before I realized how pretentious the whole idea was.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that almost all models can be accessed for free through dozens of different sites, and if you take a little time to learn about synoptics, you can get all you need to know about the Euro from the WMO mandatory levels reproduced on Levi's site and elsewhere. Really, the only thing those guys have done is brought over-resolved and obnoxiously inflated Euro snow maps to the general public, and those aren't something that anyone needs... especially not the general public. We don't have to pretend someone is changing the world to acknowledge that they're good at getting money from people.

It is, but it's called the "CMC" under the globals tab. I just like to refer to it as the GGEM or GDPS to differentiate it from the other models produced by the Canadian Meteorological Center. Otherwise it's a bit like telling someone to look at the NCEP or the "American model" and expecting them to know which one you're talking about.