powderfreak

12z NAM has many hours of snow... going to be some weird banding but several models have liked MPV to J.Spin and maybe up to here. It almost has a standing wave look instead of banding, so maybe there’s some weird terrain stuff going on. That pattern looks like mid-level banding with a blocked SE low level flow.

Car said -6F leaving my house this morning. Finally felt really cold...that nostril freezing cold as soon as you step outside. Looks like MVL hit -8F for the min. Crazy that’s only like 10F below normal and it feels like the face of the moon. Too used to walking outside to like 18-24F every morning.

I think the fact that he switched teams, and then took THEM to the super bowl, cements his legacy without a doubt. At his age too. Doesn’t matter who he plays for, they are going to the Super Bowl.

Had a decent sunset this evening.

There’s some sort of force field there.

Just because they do, doesn’t mean you have to look at them .

Ha, I saw this panel and was thinkin' about your trials and tribulations.

Ha yes! Perfect. I just picture walking outside with the dog at 5am and find that dude sitting in my yard. Your kids going "Daddy, there's someone out there."

We start to get excited and then channel the inner J.Spin science mind to try to figure out if it's valid to get excited, ha.

We’ve got a lot of water in the middle. The existing base was dense, then locally here I got about 2” of slop on 1” water, then some wetter/dense upslope... then some real dry snow the last couple days. I had 14.5” this morning... top is fluffy, then there’s a very stout thick layer from the high QPF event sitting in the middle (acting like a floor), and then semi-faceted snow under that.

Awesome shot by a friend in Hyde Park just north of Morrisville. Strong north winds along the Spine causing kelvin helmholtz clouds. Wonder if that is from the shear caused by the gap there in the Spine?

I sense a J.Spin meme in here somewhere.... like a snow king sitting on top of picnic table covered in two feet of snow. Must be some Game of Thrones character that could fit the bill, ha.

Only lower mountain lifts at this time, lots of wind holds. Gusting 50mph in the parking lot and 70-80mph at the top. It is brutal out this morning.

Yeah totally get it. This must feel insane, ha. Just wait till that CoCoRAHS site gets 48" in 5 days or something behind you. This was a solid period for the mountains but it can get out of hand pretty quickly at other times. Or like the period we just went through but then throw on another synoptic 10-18"... but alas it looks pretty boring going forward.

It took 32 days for ORH to record a below normal daily temperature departure during this stretch. That is obscene.

I know I've been enjoying it and posting happily, but it also hasn't been "epic". I'm with J.Spin on that one. It's just been a good period of winter, which this year feels a bit better. I mean we are talking about mountains and places that can do 36" of upslope in 36 hours... or the 80" in a week type cycles. 36" in 7 days at my High Road plot is fun but it's not anything overly noteworthy except for when it doesn't snow in years like this. I mean, that had 106" in 3 weeks back in 2017... like that's an epic or noteworthy period, ha. But this season has tended to want to spread the love to the lower elevations more too. The elevation gradient hasn't been as severe as it can be. We got a fun week of snow in an overall slow season... I think of 2015-16 and a poor winter when SNE ripped off a couple good storms. I remember one with 15" of paste in CT among others while NNE starved. Also, orographic snows will always be sharp with a gradient depending on the set-up, Froude number, amount of blocked flow. This one was a bit more unblocked and favored slightly further east in the upslope zone and spread the love out more. Other times it will be a big blocked flow period and the west side of the upslope zone will get destroyed while the eastern ends will see wind-blown flurries for days and days. The OTG difference was the initial storm, IMO. If that tracks west (like mreaves alluded to), and that initial 6-16" disappears as rain, then this whole thing is just a serviceable upslope period with a few inches per day.

I feel like it happens both ways... I mean when that monster storm rolled through with 12-44" in December, far NNE up here and over through Phin's area had like a few inches of snow on the ground, ha. Big difference but in the reverse. This was sort of like "one" storm though of haves and have nots... followed by days and days of orographic snows. I still don't know if I'd consider it a true NNE vs SNE pattern either. I think we'd want multiple storms of similar tracks/thermals. This is more like upslope country vs. non-upslope country, instead of NNE/SNE, in my opinion. But SE of the mountains (even parts of NNE) just never recovered from the Grinch storm, which without a doubt plays into the mood/vibe. It wouldn't help much, but it would at least make a difference if SNE had held onto some of the December snow this whole time. We definitely got a bit lucky, but also used the insurance policy of orographics to produce a very snowy period where one might not have otherwise existed. Either way, even I don't dare posting in that thread anything remotely close to happiness or enjoyment right now. Just full on funeral there.

Love those crisp cuts and angles in the snowpack. Well done dude.

Cold. Wind. Snow. Another day of recreating at the neighborhood playground.

It really is crazy how warm it’s been for so long... but yet also below freezing most of the time. Today felt brutal on the chairlift getting blasted by wind at 1F. But this would’ve been a warm day some months (ahem Feb 2015), ha. Honestly today should be a few times per week occurrence at this point, not a note-worthy cold shot.

A good sign of a cold air mass is when the ASOS just reports haze... that arctic air with crystals perpetually in the air, sometimes it’s snowing, often it’s just really small crystals blown around in the wind. All day today at the mountain was somewhere between that fine line of light snow and just arctic haze.

Damn there was a skier buried in one yesterday but his head was just close enough to the top that he could get air. Rest of body was two feet down in rubble. He survived. Sucks extra hard when a rescuer dies.

Haha yeah, what a period it’s been for the mountains. Winter-changing vibe since that elevation paste started last Friday night. The one thing I have noticed with CoCoRAHS on the maps is if a spot is missing data for a day, it won’t display it at all in those “ranges” map settings. Sort of an annoying quirk but if someone doesn’t enter a 0” for days with no snowfall/precip (some sites just seem to not report anything if nothing happens), then it won’t include that site. Like it needs to see a value every day regardless. That’s not happening in this example but I’ve found sites disappear and then you go back and find more sites manually... they just don’t display if they have any missing data at all.

Oh yeah I just went to the start of that big storm. Friday to this morning. It started down south a little earlier. No biggie, doesn’t matter in the end, ha.

Haha it’s the new Cocorahs weenie app download where it throws out values higher than your neighborhood site. One of them is in Central VT just north of Killington and the other is in Mitch’s hood.