Gut instinct is that our best reasonable hope for Thursday/Friday is some widespread light snow with the upper level shortwave passage. This is pretty much the euro-ai solution.
MLK storm in January 2022 was sorta like that. Was low teens the morning it started, got a couple inches of snow, mixed, turned to heavy rain. No thunder that I recall.
Yeah going to be volatile tracking for sure. Jan-Feb 2014 had most events pop up in short to medium range. @Bob Chillmentions this. But the more shots on goal we get, and at peak climo as @psuhoffman said, the better chance we get.
Apologies if it was already mentioned but GFSAI has a couple rounds of winter weather it looks like. Different solutions to all the possible events vs Ops though.
And keep ticking that all west. “Classic” east coast storms have the H5 trough go neutrally tilted near the MS river and negative around the time it hits the Apps. We’ve definitely moved in the right direction in that regard, but the reason OTS solutions still occur (aside from phasing challenges) is the trough is too positively tilted.
@mitchnick’s EPS is definitely a small step back at 18z. Only slight positive improvement is the northern stream in Canada is farther ahead than 12z. But our trough is obviously flatter.
All 3 metro airports were BN for the first week of January, even with a double digit AN day yesterday. RIC is above normal for the month because yesterday was so warm.