powderfreak

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.

I don't know... NE MA is starting to show up as a subsidence spot. Whether Coastalwx wants to acknowledge it or not. Consistently 0.5-0.75" less than ORH.

That’s a good shot of water on the 18z ECMWF.

Still haven’t caught on like BTV? C’mon now, lol. I love the AFDs that are like “Should just paint 100% POPS whenever the flow goes NW. the question isn’t whether it precipitates but how much.”

Ahhh I thought he might be a NWS met who took offense to your ALB/OKX comment.

Hope people in that strong snow band with 2" of water weight have shoveled their roofs and filled the sand bags. That area around Ludlow, VT south to Mitch precipitates very efficiently on SSE low level flow... also the SE Adirondack zone that got crushed too. They get some solid orographic help in these cutters from GFL and westward.

Who is John Bagioni? lol.

Can also see the unblocked flow as the best echos at 6,000ft are east of the Mansfield here into Stowe. Finally got a decent burst of snow to whiten the roads... been mild today flirting 32-34F for a while in the valley. Only about a half inch today or so, wouldn't surprise me if it was a tenth of an inch of water though. Lots of dippin' dots.

Very unblocked flow... definitely a good set-up for you Phin as the precipitation can propagate well downstream. Narrow streamers too that looks like you've gotten into one. Not the usual "wall of snow" packed into the NW side of the mountains but more narrow convergence zones... odd that the area NW of MWN proper is in a gap. Sometimes the unorganized events can be better for the spots outside the classic NW flow zone. Looks like they propagate quite a bit downwind of the mountains too.

What do you have for snowfall so far?

Yeah very possible. Since about noon it's been more convective looking structures, lots of rime. Driving RT 100 around noon there was just a full on graupel storm going on at that that high point on the Waterbury Stowe line near the Lawn Rangers landscaping spot. Enough to quickly cover the road in dippin dots.

Been snowing most of the day in town but it’s been a lot of graupel and bullets/rimed flakes. Certainly not dendrites, so don’t really have much accumulation to show for it. Very low ratio crystal structure.

I generally agree with you on this one... if those dew points are legit there’s no stable cold low level layer. I’d have to imagine it’s pretty decent mixing if surface dews are 55-60F in late December over snowpack.

About 27 less inches this run .

Tonight is a Jay flow, IMO. Model signature leads me to believe they may perform substantially better than Mansfield. I gotta get up to Jay once we get some snow. No mega-pass affiliation and closed Canadian border. We’ve been saying it all along, special times for Jay skiers.

Nobody buys day tickets anymore anyway, it’s all pass holders who go anyway regardless of condition lol. Epic Pass and IKON Pass have essentially replaced day tickets. Leads to busier crowds on crap days because they figure they’ve already paid for it.

I mean can’t get any better than that. Like a 2-day upslope storm after a synoptic paste job.

The snow is just so “tired” up here without getting that big storm. Just gets groomed and skied into oblivion each day... snow eventually breaks down to dust or ice granular with repetitive crushing.

Ha! We had our White Thanksgiving, but that one last event may have screwed us for Xmas. Only 0.40” water frozen on the ground right now up here. Speaking of IJD, time to install? Nothing like waking up to dews of 55+ on Xmas Morning (7am).

Our totals are pretty bad but we’ve had a decent number of days of snow cover. Had a 10-inch warning criteria upslope storm and plenty of days of snowfall. Really was just this last event where it really stands out. When we snow, no one else does...and when everyone else snows, we don’t lol. The snow cover for this time of year though is the real story though.