weatherwiz

ughh I was pretty excited with some features of the GFS looking better...but I seriously think we would struggle to really accumulate.

Also something to keep in mind is, looking through some soundings really quickly, it seems like the DGZ is going to be relatively high, well above the greatest lift. This would have a substantial impact on snow growth and ratios.

It appears as if it takes a bit longer for the shortwave to totally get sheared apart on this run. But this is some beast WAA

HOly shit...I just saw a good sized limb break off the pine tree and come down

This is going to be the most intriguing aspect in terms of forecasting potential snowfall totals. There is going to be an extremely tight temperature gradient within a short-distance. If that does verify, there is going to be a very narrow intense banding of enhanced fronto in the 850-700 layer. Where that occurs and if it does is where the strip of highest totals will be. One thing to watch too is east slopes of the Berks who could destroy in this (as usual)

Getting super excited now, just scared of being let down. I'll even take 3-4''. In this winter that would make me happy.

I would like to winter of winter in two ways 1) Seasonal snowfall accumulation. 2) How many accumulating snowfall events (with a subset of events greater than specific amounts). But then it's also really too each their own. Someone who got say 50'' (which is about their average) but 35'' came from two storms may call it a solid winter while someone who got 50'' (about their average) but it was spread out between about 7-8 storms is a solid winter.

Anyone else noticing birds acting crazy? Crows are going wild...a giant swarm of them and they all screaming.

My timeline must be way off. This is why recollection from memory alone can be a terrible idea.

Ahhh yes, that's the one I was thinking of.

I swear we had one sometime in January. I remember being super excited and once it went to crap I virtually just checked out.

My memory doesn't work the same anymore, so I can't remember specific dates but there were a few.

I may be wrong, but I think the 18-24'' was to account for both rounds as they were getting two rounds of heavy snow. One was Monday night into Tuesday and the second Tuesday night into this morning.

We've had multiple. Perhaps the more noteworthy one was maybe a month or so ago. The agreement was through the roof. There was even one earlier in the winter.

eh it's not a game of predicting what a model will do. Remember, models are essentially just tools, forecasting goes well beyond just taking model output verbatim, as you know. But even looking at the 12z GFS...it's a great piece of voriticty that ejects through the Ohio Valley and then just gets shredded and becomes a vorticy mess. Once the occlusion happens, the WAA turns to a halt, and sure while there is vorticity and forcing still traversing the region, to me, it just seems like we'd be dealing with a broken precipitation shield with crappy precipitation rates. Just think about how many potential events have looked good over the past 2-3 winters and once we got inside the day 3-4 mark have just gone to crap. We would all be excited because of strong model agreement, whether it be OP and ensembles or good ensemble support, then we get to that D3-4 mark...one model comes in like crap, and we just b/c maybe it was the NAM or an "off-hour 18z GFS" and then all of a sudden, slowly there is that trend. This has happened way too many times to just be a coincidence over and over...there's obviously a reason for that (what that reason is makes for great debate).

I'm not totally dismissing that, but we've seen how terrible the models performances have been this winter and the past 2-3 winters. I get the "taken at face value" concept, but what does that really do? The way I see this, looking at the synoptic setup is, we are going to have to rely heavily on the WAA induced precipitation for some widespread heavy snow. This is something that certainly isn't impossible, but we have seen countless times, where even ensembles are in strong agreement, only for things to "crap" the bed as we get closer...it's a theme that has been repeated countless times these past few years. How I am envisioning this playing out, based on the synoptics is, if this look were to remain constant through the weekend we would see a trend towards a weaker event and not a stronger one. My reasoning for that is within my earlier post. The flow is very fast and we've seen many times this winters that shortwaves open up, become flat, and occlude as they accelerate northeast through the Plains into the upper-Midwest/Ohio Valley region. The result is a rapidly occluding parent low. It's just so difficult to take anything at face value now because the models have struggled mightily, even with the synoptic evolution and even within the short term.

It was a pretty interesting setup when looking at the models the day before. I wasn't thinking tornado, but thought damaging wind gusts/hail would be possible. Dynamics were quite strong with very steep lapse rates. Not totally true, but that did happen two winters ago.

ehhh I'm not that good with winter weather, but I try to look at it from an objective side and not let one or two products influence my thinking.

What I hate about this is the flow is so fast and as the shortwave flies across the country it opens up, flattens out, and the main low rapidly occludes. Of course the other issue is the models have been rather horrific lately with the evolution of the pattern into the medium range and the synoptic details so it's been increasingly difficult to take any merit looking a few days out. My initial thinking is the best best for heavy widespread precipitation will be with the front end with strong WAA and everything after that is just shredded crap. Relying on something like an IVT or hoping for the secondary to pop exactly where we want/need it is like trying to connect a hail mary from your own 30 with below-average arm strength. We've seen this modeled setup several times over the past few years.

It's a shame what some of these products do within the field. Model snowfall maps with winter weather and supercell composite/significant tornado parameter and that ridiculous AI CIPS or whatever it is. Even if these products have value (which they do) they're used so irresponsibly that every single "event" that pops up on guidance, whether it be some severe threat in the Plains or winter event in the Northeast gets totally blown out of proportion.

Best looking storm we'll see all summer Was pretty intrigued yesterday for some strong thunderstorm potential today. Was shocked there wasn't even a general thunderstorm line yesterday afternoon.

I also sent an email to PSL with a user enhancement suggestion. It would be PHENOMENAL if multiple composites can be downloaded at once. The way I do it is I create a composite, copy it, and paste it into a pain document. So if I'm doing weak La Nina winter temperature anomalies, I'll put in each year (one at a time) to make the composite then put into paint. This process is TEDIOUS and extremely time consuming. In reality, I'd never accomplish what I'm trying to do. Would have to work 24/7 on it lol

I am going to go back and re-start this whole project. What I need to do is create a documentation of I guess what you can call definitions, or guidelines, to establish as much consistency as possible. One thing I've learned when it comes to research is, there really is no right or wrong way as long as you're establishing criteria and consistency. Since this is dealing with ENSO I'll use ENSO as an example, but let's say I wanted to create a list of La Nina winter's and someone else did too. Based on what criteria we each choose, we may come up with different results. This doesn't mean one is wrong. As we know, when it comes to ENSO, there are two components, oceanic and atmospheric. When classifying ENSO or assessing ENSO (whether it be current state of predicted state), we solely turn to the oceanic aspect, sea-surface temperature anomalies. We can assess this via the Oceanic-Nino Index (ONI) which focuses on the 3.4 region. However, the atmospheric aspect of ENSO is just as important. So I want to really focus and incorporate this aspect as well. Before I create composites, I want to focus on the following: 1) ENSO phase classification (La Nina or EL Nino) - I will be using the CPC's Oceanic-Nino Index (ONI) and Eric Webb's Ensemble Oceanic-Nino Index EONI). The strength of incorporating the EONI is you have a much longer dataset to utilize with ENSO events going back to the late 1800's. This index also incorporates the numerous definitions which exist in classifying ENSO events. 2) ENSO strength classification (Weak, Moderate, Strong/Super-strong) - The strength will based upon the peak strength of the event. The exception will be if the peak occurred in the late spring or summer months (which a few events meet). For events which are borderline in strength (as determined by the ONI/EONI) I will list that event in both. This will provide a measure to see how "well" that event fits in with other events in either strength. 3) ENSO structure classification (West-Based, Basin-Wide, East-Based) - This is where when going back I noticed a lot of discrepancies in my original breakdowns. I re-created SSTA plots and re-created a list without looking at the original to see if the new list matched the original list. It did not. This told me I had no consistency with my classifications. So, with that, the new list focuses more heavily on where the core of the greatest anomalies were located. I think doing this broke up the basin-wide events a bit. I also found a few I classified as west when it was clearly east and vice versa. 4) Atmospheric component - For this I will be heavily looking into SOI, MEI and even looking into BEST (Bivariate ENSO timeseries) and the TNI (trans-nino index). As I was starting this, my thinking was I could use the SOI and MEI to assist in the strength classification. However, I found there wasn't a strong correlation between these values and the strength (oceanic) of the ENSO event. After some thinking and reading it occurred to me, these indices can be used to help determine how coupled the ENSO event is (atmospheric-oceanic coupling). There are some weak La Nina's with relatively high SOI's and some stronger one's with lower SOI's. So you can have a weak event that is strongly coupled and a strong event that isn't. This can help identify events which may act more how you would "expect" the event to behave. In terms of composites, initially all the composites focused on DJF. That's fine and good and all, but all that does is provide an "average" of an entire season. This does absolutely nothing with illustrating transitions or periods of deviations - which at the end of the day is really what is most important with weather forecasting. I want to continue with DJF composites, but also do composites for the following breakdowns: 1) OND 2) DJF 3) NDJFM 4) Monthly (October, November, December, January, February, March) 5) 6-week breakdowns

Well I've decided to go back and re-do my composites. Noticed a few things and made changes. It sucks b/c of all the work done, but the changes I think made sense. Anyways, I don't know why this didn't stick out to me before, but the La Nina of 1971-1972 was very interesting. It's one of the only ENSO events in which the core anomalies are displaced well outside of the equatorial region (5°N to 5°S). The only other ENSO event close happened a few years later (1974-1975). This only caught my attention because I'm taking a stronger look at classifying structure and trying to develop a consistent "definition" and reasoning to back up the classification. I guess this would go down as East Based (which I had previously).

The NBM blows