powderfreak

Better to have loved and lost, than not loved at all right? Flood warnings flying across central New England.

Same to you Ginxy! Merry Christmas all!

In Mountain Operations Center alone on Christmas morning (first one in at 5:15am) and the roof sounds like it’s about to lift off. The whole building is creaking in the wind as rain slams the windows sideways. 52F at 1500ft and 47F at the summit (tied record high so far). Winds gusting up to 50mph in the base and 80mph on the upper mountain. Torrential rain. “Merry Christmas, don’t go outside” is the report from up here.

Same depth as the top of Mount Mansfield probably, ha!

It was really inverted here for a while, the upper mountain was ripping south winds. Even at 7am recorded wind gusts of 58mph and 53mph were seen by the Quad top and Gondola top stations. Down below 2,500ft it was pretty much calm as the wind stayed up high. This afternoon though it started breaking the inversion with a few gusts developing between periods of calm at 4pm down low at 1500ft. All day has basically been 30G50+ at the MMNV1 station. Well modeled though as it increases to near 70kts+ tomorrow morning.

It takes a lot of energy to melt a good frozen mass. I think some are under-estimating the staying power of 1-2” of water equiv. This is a legit torch storm, but many areas have some respectable frozen water for their climo areas in December.

The crazy thing is how little river ice there is, even in NNE. It's been warm. There's some ice but nothing like most years even for Christmas. Rivers in the mountains by this time can have some pretty thick ice with just a narrow channel of moving water visible. No real threat of ice jams with this one it seems.

And the rain has started. Happy Holiday's to the weather crew here.

Yeah you guys actually get surrounded by water and have it come inside. Living along a flashy waterway can be interesting.

8-10” for MWN? Models love to jack up the low level moisture over the peaks.

Horse drawn sled... so Norman Rockwell and also so Vermont.

I only take comfort in the fact that I've already experienced my Christmas nirvana. That storm on Christmas Day 2002 that dropped two feet in like 12 hours. A very similar storm to the one this month where a deep interior band just maxed out with snowfall rates over 4"/hr. I'm never going to see anything like this ever again on Christmas Day, just like winning the weather/holiday lottery. "By the end of the event, Albany, New York, received more than 24 inches of snow. With most of the snow falling in a 12-hour period, the storm is widely remembered for its quick and disruptive nature."

More than everyone else. CAD zone and 2" water equiv of frozen mass... this is a bad cutter but not that bad to overcome that.

I feel like at some point the CT electric companies will figure this out.

Last clear view today looking south from Mansfield before the clouds rolled in.

The Grinch storm has started as a decent burst of moderate snow with the warm air advection. Almost a quick inch in the past hour at the ski area. Gotta pad those stats before it gets washed away, .

Yeah it was snowing pretty hard all the sudden at the mountain. Now snowing down in town, took a bit to saturate.

We’ve seen time and time again there’s humor behind the science professor with JSpin. He always subtly drops some of the funniest sarcasm on the forum.

Yeah seems like they flew past Sugarbush too. I mean those guys can cover Vermont in like 15 minutes, ha.

What a day! Had a great view this morning of the Vermont Air National Guard taking out the F-35 fighter jets. They were doing formations and then breaking off of each other to do loops. There was at least a half dozen of them in the air this morning. They looked like they must be having the time of their lives, flying fighter jets through bluebird skies. The speed is hard to comprehend... they were just crushing it through the sky. Like flying a damn rocket ship over Vermont, ha.

The Lookout Snow Plot is seeing a nice surge in snowfall this evening. Picked up a real quick inch to go with today's couple inches of snow showers. This is cleared once a day (board flips) at 6am for reference.

This is why we put 100% pops on NW flow? Like Phin said, quite a distraction from the coming Grinch. That escalated quickly. Full dendrites now, the wall of precip developed fast with the nocturnal inversion trying to get going. Mountain is getting hammered all the sudden. Did a black and white filter on the cell phone off the back porch. POPs near 100%, ha.

It makes sense how it's calculated in the model sense. A bunch of models showing 0.05"-0.10" over say Connecticut probably should be a different POP than a bunch of models showing that same thing in the Northern Greens and Northern Whites. In CT relying on synoptic lift, there's still a decent chance that doesn't happen or it's more scattered/spread out... but in the mountains that signal is going to result in precipitation falling from the sky much more often than not. Maybe its a quarter inch of snow, maybe it's 3-4"... but something will fall.

History has shown about a one to two winter learning curve for resorts and their customers. By the third winter, RIFD is as smooth as it gets. Part of it is consumer education and the other part is operational education. Once it gets dialed, it is the way to go, along with long distance scanners that can hit a ticket anywhere on a persons body, even buried in a wallet. The days of having to take out and show a pass to someone, or take it out to have someone scan it, are over. You get your ticket or pass, you put it in your snowpants pocket and you don't have to fish for it every lap. Just cruise on through.

That’s why POPS are such an easy forecast with upslope. Probability of precipitation has nothing to do with amounts, but it 100% is going to precipitate given certain broad parameters. The mountains do not move, this isn’t like synoptic lift that relies on forcing that may move around and offer some uncertainty. It’s rock anchored to the ground and it is going to cause sufficient lift to, at the very least, get precipitation to fall from the sky. Thats why I never get the POPS forecasts... it should be near 100% every time the models spit out panels of even 0.01+ in the usual spots and the flow is out of some sort of westerly direction lol.