weatherwiz

If anyone wants or is looking for winter storms, the northern Rockies, northern Plains, and upper-Midwest is where you'll want to be

Meanwhile down in Hawaii 

This is nuts 

Amazing what strong mixing with a warm low-level airmass can do coupled with WAA ongoing in the low levels as well. 

Really no complaints. Locally the blizzard was disappointing but I was expecting that here given location (though the screw job was a bit worse than I was expecting). But it was a solid winter. 

The only thing I will hate about the winter is our dog's condition and mental health plummeted. Around January he refused to go outside anymore and really became more depressed. We really wish we had done the wheel chair early last summer instead of late in the fall because he was so excited using it. But then the cold/snow/ice came and that was it. Unfortunately to the point (plus with kidney failure which came out of nowhere) we have to put him down in 3 weeks. I'll always wonder if the cold/ice/snow played a big roll in this or if just an unfortunate coincidence. 

But several snow events here, most small, one big one in January then a few moderate events. The scenes outside after the snows...beautiful. So no complaints here

5 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Yeah, like tomorrow  lol

It may be delayed and/or mitigated a little in WOR or SW CT but my experience (and climo of model error for that matter) if there is a BD within reach, it typically really end up in Atlanta GA's asshole

Tomorrow is going to be a slap in the face. 

Temps will finally warm up...during the evening and overnight but then drop off Thursday AM with the fropa lol. 

Maybe we can get an early season Sonoran heat release with EML to end March or begin April  

16 minutes ago, WinterWolf said:

Enjoy…it’s all a memory in a couple days. That’s what sucks. 

Once you start getting days like this in March it's kind of hard to want to go back in the direction for more snow lol. I mean if we're talking about something like 12-18", hell yeah bring it...but a few days of this and you just want it to stay. Its almost like a tease because you know we've got our share of 30's and 40's with clouds and drizzle coming but on the other hand, this is a taste for whats's to come in another few months 

I'm not really seeing a whole lot to be excited about in terms of winter storm threats or potential for the second half of the month. This doesn't apply to northern New England or elevations though...they will always find a way to sneak in some accumulating snow well into April.

But when it comes to the GFS at least, I'd be very skeptical about it being way too aggressive with the EC troughing and colder look. Yes, that look or "tenor" has been a theme during the winter but we're moving into a new regime now with the hemisphere and wavelengths transitioning to the warmer season and this is when the GFS bias for extended range trough/cold may be overestimated. Yes other guidance hints at this but not to the degree of the GFS and something more along the lines of transient. 

Still plenty of cold to our north which keeps us in the game but nothing to me looks overly excited...especially since antecedent airmasses are going to suck. 

3km with some violence ripping across PA tomorrow. May even see some elevated thunderstorms move across SNE tomorrow night...pretty decent MUCAPE on the 3km

2 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

I mean is it going to hurt skill scores and just shrink the enhanced area and say in this area we could see strong tornadoes? I like that part of the new products. 

I believe this does change the probabilities which designates the categories. For example, it looks like it will be more difficult now to get a high risk day which I think is a great idea because really if a high risk is issued...you want that to be held for days where widespread significant severe is going to happen. This may hopefully reduce more of the high risk "busts" we have seen. 

I am with you...I am definitely not bashing this either, just trying to understand it more. But with what you said I think makes sense and if that is the case and purpose I can understand it a bit better. 

I'm sure there is some literature on this, I've only read the little bit on the SPC site. 

1 minute ago, CoastalWx said:

So we are getting cute and hashing 90% of the area as increased tornado threat and the other 10% is supposed to be enhanced due to other reasons? Doesn’t really make sense.

That's how I kind of see it. So in that tornado probability that intensity 2 area is supposed to indicate if a tornado occurs, the reasonable max intensity is EF3 and the intensity 1 area is max intensity EF2. I think though this is supposed to help local forecasters and emergency management to better communication to the public but I don't see how this helps.

3 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Why would they not hash that whole Enhanced area?

I am still trying to gauge this new conditional intensity thing. But I am with you...seems odd the entire thing isn't filled in and what additional value does this have over the regular hatching? But I guess its to highlight what the "max intensity" may be. IDK...I feel like this is going to cause more uncertainty or even hype that isn't needed

First go around with an intensity 2 for tornadoes (also have it for hail in Texas). Very curious to see how this changes or enhances public communication or if it just adds confusion. I wonder what @OceanStWx thoughts on this conditional intensity addition is. 

2 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

NAM says we all porked. I'd like to think it may be too aggressive, but it tends to sniff these out. 

It's going to be super close WOR. Looking at some soundings from the NAM WOR you can see a more SE component to the wind but (Even though its March) if the NAM is overdoing the clouds/AM precip, it would not take much to mix out that shallow and subtle layer. Could be a day where DXR gets to like 66 and BOS 41

3 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

That is a nasty nasty BD on the NAM... has Boston plummeting to the upper 30s on Wed ... 24 hour ahead of the main front.  

It's probably got boundary layer lag bias.   It's the same reason why it can't warm the BL sufficiently at this time of year in general - today, etc..; they've sort of designed a model that over assesses the Ekman stuff. 

That said... it's also hard to argue BDs in eastern NE at any time of year, let alone f'um March.  

The NAM is also a bit more robust with clouds/precip Wednesday too 

Gotta love this time of year  

BOS for tomorrow

6z MAV: 66

0z MET: 52

7z NBM: 62 

We've reached the time of year where the NAM is as useless as ever with temperatures (unless there is a front overhead/nearby) or we have CAD. 

Could see some showers with thunder develop around/after daybreak Wednesday morning on the nose of the advecting MUCAPE

Pretty crazy seeing a long-tracked tornado on the ground in Michigan with temperatures/dewpoints only into the 50's. That cell is a beast 

6 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

OH I think the storm track's shifted N, frankly.   I won't have hurt feelings if I turn out wrong there, but I have the equinox, climatology, and CC on my side here.  Look at the sfc cinema on that run.  It's one transit after the other down the 50th parallel of the continent.   They'll drape strong cold fronts, sure.  And probably some labored warm fronts ahead that drizzle at 34F.  ...all keeping us from being "warm warm" like you're intimating, but I'm sort of leaning on the first step out being a coherent retreat of the storm track.  

We can still get a wintry event via anomaly relative to that, or bowling season related, etc.. but those are by def fleeting. 

Can't disagree with this

11 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

The last two days worth of GFS operational cycles have been doing this sort of look out there in the la-la range ... new leitmotif.  I've found in the spring ( and autumn with cold looks, too - works in either direction), these longer range charts might actually carry some principle value, not daily or per se prognostic skill.  Those are two different things. One's conceptualizing a synoptic potential at longer leads, the other is deterministic.   

Anyway, this next week's "failing" warm up was really exposed similarly to this above... when it too was a long lead.  But idiosyncratics about the late winter/early spring hemisphere emerged to suppress, more so then corrected.  In other words, I wonder it the lower latitude planetary wave distribution (which has longer residence ) is actually a warm HA - cool Baja - warm SW Atlantic basin...  It would be sitting in wait for those "idiosyncractics" of late winter and early spring to pull away...

It's such a tease looking at that. We're so close to the warmth but the heights are totally compressed up here. This isn't a good look either in the Southeast, especially Florida where I think they are in a pretty bad drought and there are major fire concerns. But that is also setting up to what could be an extremely active March in the Great Plains there. But for here...certainly going to be several wintry mix threats.

30 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

I know what you're getting at... 

It's the difference between a well mixed warm sector with amorphous WCB trafficking strata and more DP related warmth.  It's 64/57 below the warm front and E of the main b-c axis. 

That kind of warm up is impressive probably more so in the DP/ thermodynmaic quotient.   The kinetic side of the temp is hugely above normal but not out of control in this kind of warm up. 

The other kind, the big dawg warming events that are more index correlated ... those are ridge dome deals with larger scale DVM compression through an unseasonably early 850 mb to surface kinetic layer.  The actual thermodynamic quotient of the atmosphere is surprisingly low...   75/27 type thing...  Moisten that air mass and it's 44 F beat the red head step child weather.   Those kind of larger planetary wave things are related to the loss of polar index/mass field modulations on the mid latitudes, and when the air is dry and there's 850 mb anomalies rattling around in the ridge, the kinetic ceiling is high.   

Which by the way...either tends to proceed a -NAO burst.  All that warmth then terminates at high latitude and there's a height growth up there.  

I'm with you too...we could be setting the stage for some early April heat. For as cold and chilly we have been here...there has been some anomalous warmth off to our southwest and it's not something that has been brief spurts either. Unless something major happened to kind of move away from this across the south, the only thing which has presented us from tapping into this has been the configuration in the Arctic. Relax that and we open the gates. 

17 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Agreed .. if using just just climate, but therein is an interesting consideration. 

Part of climate practicum is being aware of recency, without it being a recency bias - tricky difference there...  But over the last 10 or 12 years, recency has verified something like 1/3 or more of the Feb thru Apr periods as hosting an exotic early season warm event.  80s dude.  With warm fronts up near Baffin Island for f sake.  I've seen that happen ... yet never saw that happen in the previous 40 some odd years of my life.  It's a new thang, man... get jiggy wit' it. 

Or, has that stopped.  I don't know, but recency has demonstrated it's no longer merely plausible... it can and will do so.  So, what the models were showing 7 to 10 days ago was another one of those crazed potentials - or at minimum, suggesting as much. 

Couldn't dismiss it out of hand because of recency.   Not really hard.  There were several runs back then with 582 dm height contours safely N of Logan's latitude. 

But like you were saying .. idiosyncrasies that are equally ( obviously ) important raised some flags.. Canada and so forth

Just going from memory here but one major difference between those extremely anomalous warm periods is there was tremendous support within the Arctic domain...meaning there was little or nothing to fight back again the building heights or compress them. Also, notice with those periods too is those patterns didn't really come with fronts readily advancing across the eastern third of the country...it's a much different story building heights naturally (such a a response to lowering heights upstream a.ka. west trough) versus forcing heights to build due to say a propagating front. 

When you get cold fronts traversing the OV and into the Northeast, more than likely there will be at least one wave developing along the front and that's what ultimately screws us in the warm sector department, particularly when the look across eastern Canada favors to squash said low. 

13 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

The problem with this warmer weather coming up is that everything is just gonna be a mess. It’s almost better that we didn’t have any snow on the ground because at least things wouldn’t be a muddy mess.
 

Finally seeing a small patch of grass where it’s sloped, wind scoured, and destroyed by turkeys pecking away at it. 

ehhh too me that's just a byproduct of a good winter...part of having a good (or great) winter is dealing with the aftermath which is spring mud season. The remainder of this month is probably going to bring it all, some very mild days, some raw/chilly days, wintry precipitation threats, rain. Hopefully by the time we get closer to April we can make a quick transition into more pleasant weather (which still can be quite the ask)

I am not sure how I feel about this conditional intensity addition to the SPC outlooks. I understand the premise behind it but I feel like this is going to introduce a great deal of confusion. I do like the changes though which will make high risks order to become issued although that means we will never see a high risk here again  

6 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Yeah I took a more discrete look at the ensemble means ( all three) and there's a lot of suggestion there that the eastern arm/warm frontal position never gets N of LI across the 11th. 

1030 .. 1035 mb high pressure over Ontario amassing its way E into Quebec doesn't exactly campaign for blasting a boundary N of Fryeburg Maine, either, so there's not much there to pick apart.   If the whole scope of it all changes, then fine.  But as is, no warm up at all NE of mid Jersey next week. 

Next

Was always very nervous about the mid-week period when looking at that configuration across Canada. It's extremely difficult this time of year here to get full blow warm frontal passages through the region. It can be easy to get carried away with seeing pretty oranges with H5 anomalies and 850 temp anomalies but there is alot that can muk up sfc warm frontal passages. This is exactly how NNE (especially elevations) can rack up end of season snowfall totals