OceanStWx

I'm never going to jump on anyone for coming up with a soundly reasoned forecast, as long as the headlines are messaging the right thing (i.e. heavy snow and power outages). If I had total control over the snow forecast yesterday I probably would've hedged closer to a foot rather than the 18. Like I mentioned with Will last evening, it seemed to evolve into more of a WAA snow, and it's hard to do more than a foot on pure WAA. We'll see how well the dry slot can fill in today. There are hints of moisture aloft moving back in, and cloud tops are cooling a little bit again, but I don't think we have another double digit period of snow.

On to the genny around 4:30 am. Woke up to 5.3" of sticky snow (~7:1).

Something broke with the scripts today and it nuked our actual forecast when the probabilities ran, so check it now for the actual current forecast. Not much different but a little beefier at the coast.

Nah. There was plenty of discussion, but overall we haven't really observed blizzards without it also being really cold, and that's just not in the forecast right now. Do I think there's a path to 20s and 1/4sm? Yes. But I'm not on the likely side at the moment.

That's the biggest difference I see between yesterday and today. There was a nice H7 low over SNE on yesterday's runs, but today it just kind of looks baggy or develops really late Thursday where it's almost over NH. In that sense it is almost purely WAA driven, which gives me more of a SWFE vibe of capping things at 10ish outside of the mountains.

Honestly I don't know much about the known biases, but I would hazard a guess that they'll be similar in nature to the HRRR (since they are both RAP based).

Yeah, when the reports started coming in of a possible microburst... But we did dig into the mesonets nearby and you could see the localized strong gusts. IIRC the inversion height was perfect for ranges like the Ossipees.

It's more that it is dry aloft in the mid levels. Wet bulb cooling the column is doing the bulk of the work there even with torchy surface temps. Surprised there haven't been a ton of AFDs crapping on the event because of warm ground. That was a great WTF event.

That's what we've found for the QPF side of the HREF. Picks out the max values well, but the areal extent is usually too large.

One thing I keep seeing on Bufkit forecast soundings is that the first 10-12 or so inches have deep saturation through the DGZ, but the next 6-10 the DGZ dries out. I would be pretty wary of that additional snow unless that profile changes significantly on these 12z runs.

LOL at the entire GYX CWA having 90% chance of 12" in 24 hrs from 00z Thu to 00z Fri.

My biggest concern is the near surface freezing temps. Is that enough to change the character of the snow, because otherwise it should be pretty dry stuff. There's also a real chance we can dynamically cool the surface even more when we toss a bunch of precip into the column given how cold it is just off the deck.

04z now.

Maybe even some accumulating snow too.

Extreme Forecast Index looking tasty from the overnight runs. QPF is pretty meh on this product, but that makes sense because 2"+ QPF in April is not unheard of. Plowable snow in April is much more rare, and so we're getting pretty uniform high EFI numbers. Most anomalous near the coast, where you wouldn't expect much April accumulation normally. The Shift of Tails black lines show your forecast potential, the highest of the high end members. A value of 2 is pretty good, and shows the biggest boom potential is just north of that mid level warm front. Congrats Dendrite?

Looking at LWM, they drop blow 0C at 950 mb like Wednesday afternoon and stay there for the duration. Now the models all have it mixing thanks to some 700 mb warm air initially, but by midnight-ish Wednesday night the whole column is cold enough for snow.

I'll say, there is really good lift in the snow growth zone around midnight Wednesday night. But the DGZ is also at like 500 mb. That always gives me pause.

I guess we had to call our plow contract in too. Mid shift ended up parking on the side of the road.

A lot of pros could stand to use that mindset too. Post analysis of events you fumbled are way more useful than anything else you pick up along the way.

Very suck. Much bad here. I’ve got as much as 0.33” radial and shotgun blasts are going off all through the neighborhood. Caught a nice transformer flash while I was out measuring. Really confirms that 0.75” ASOS measured flat ice is the right number around here for an ice storm warning.

Got the kids down just in time for the power and internet to go out. Genny’s running but can’t watch a damn thing.

Between snow and sleet I’m at 6.1” today (0.5” pure sleet), and up to 0.2” radial ice now. Power has flickered four times now.