nj2va

We often score when the NAO relaxes.

The heck if I know....the smarter ones could comment way better I'm sure. A few thoughts I have: 1) The H5 pattern gets exponentially better for snow chances in the region beginning in a week or so. If it happens verbatim, it would take an epic fail for MA standards to not see snow (people should temper their KU expectations since those are hard to come by). 2) You're beginning to see signs on the GEFS snow mean maps that the period beginning in a week or so has some legs if you compare that to what we usually see for a 5-7 day snow mean. While I don't live and die by snow mean maps, they're helpful in spotting uber LR trends in potential. Yeah, I'm sure its the weenie in me saying this but I find it hard to believe we are shutout the rest of the month.

6z GEFS isn’t enthused on snow chances for the next 7-8 days. Continues to suggest our chances increase after the 15th/16th. ETA: Here’s the 7 day mean ending 1/22. if we can’t score a warning-level event in this pattern along 95, time to see PSU and Ji go scorched earth.

I haven’t looked at the surface at all but 500 is north of 18z and heights are a good bit higher along the coast. Hopefully translates to the surface... ETA: No dice.

Vort on the GFS looks good through 84 but we need that confluence shred factory to lift north to hold it together in the next couple frames. Heights are a touch higher than 18z along the coast. Let’s see what happens from here.

Looks better at H5 than 18z GFS at H90. What could go wrong?

Weeklies are useless Week 3 and beyond but I’d argue they’re useless every week....

We’ll be talking about the epic MLK day blizzard with that pattern.

I’m not a fan of living and dying by snowfall mean maps BUT 18z GEFS 5 day snowfall mean (1/16-1/21) is 2” in DC. That’s as good a signal we could expect 10-14 days out for a 5 day mean.

@mdhokie - second day in a row a GFS run gave 3-4 feet for Deep Creek through 1/23.

If GFS ran to 400 hours, Ji would have been happy with more blue over him.

I thought WxUSAF hit on this earlier today in the model thread....weak west coast ridging so I think it means there's a lot of s/w flying all over. I'm a dummy with weather so who knows if this is right but perhaps that changes when we get better WC ridging later this month.

Bullseye of 9" of snow on the LA/MS border.

"I had a feeling things weren't going to trend well in the pattern change, but I was afraid to say it."

Can you clarify what makes the upcoming pattern a bootleg NAO ridge vs a true H5 block?

I was thinking something along similar lines but you articulate it way better - I like your idea of some kind of atmospheric/H5/pattern and a separate S/MR threat thread. When we had the December threat, this was getting a bit much in here between tracking H5 patterns and the actual threat IMO.

@frd all of that is fine and interesting, but I’m over tracking wind changes and pattern changes, and ready to track a threat.

I actually don’t think there’s a huge amount of change we’d need at H5 per PSU’s comments above. I liked 0z’s evolution upstairs way better than 18z FWIW.

We just can’t have nice things.

Yep. Will need a little bit of ns interaction to raise heights ahead of it/pull it north but i like seeing less shredding interference so far.

GFS at 5H looks different (again) at H84.

Yeah, sorry I deleted my post already. I realized I was looking at the GEFS. Oops!

18z Euro gets some very light precip up to Stafford County. #flurrywatch

Certainly hasn't been a torch even close in by any means. We'll score this month along/east of 95 I think.

!!!!! NSFW. Looks like I need to spend the month of January working from Deep Creek...