bluewave

Dude give it a rest. My comment over a year ago was that it would be challenging for NYC Central Park to measure 50” on the season and not the surrounding locations which are naturally snowier like ISP and EWR. You will notice that I never use the term impossible just how challenging something is given a particular climate state and temperature level. I am very happy how this winter turned out since it was one of my scenarios which included a rebound off the recent year snowfall lows. It’s funny how you jumped on my post in December which mentioned getting over 4-6” in December is a good sign for winter implying that I didn’t know what I was talking about. My other observation and outlook issued several years ago is that it would be a challenge to rival snowfall during 1993-1994 in PA, 1995-1996 in our area, 2009-2010 in DC to Philly, 2013-2014 around Detroit and the Midwest, and 2014-2015 around Boston. That was based on the temperature jump following the 2015-2016 super El Niño and smaller areas of cold relative to the past. But I didn’t say impossible. You will notice that this winter across the CONUS was one of the warmest ones. So the fact that the cold was compressed into the East much more than usual was illustrating the smaller Northern Hemisphere cold pool. The legacy snowfall winters from 1994 to 2015 had a larger area of cold to work with allowing all-time seasonal snowfall highs. I actually hope that NYC can measure 50” before the season ends. But NYC, LGA, and JFK sit in the heat island and also end up between the best banding during KU events over NNJ and across Long Island. So it’s more challenging for 50” measurements relative to other areas.

The issue with next Monday is the very strong high pressure forecast to be over the Northeast. So if the system ejects too soon, then it will get suppressed. But a later ejection would probably mean a front end thump to rain or mix potential Tuesday into Wednesday. Plus we could get a suppressed system Monday followed by another with mixing issues Tuesday into Wednesday.

The blizzard was the only time this winter that the GFS did so well. It’s really hard to say why this was the case. But now we are probably back to the regularly scheduled programming of the AIFS or EPS AIFS doing better. It could just be the broken clock analogy with the GFS but we may never know for sure.

Score another win for the SPC HREF as it had the heavier totals into Fairfield.

They will have to do dock and bulkhead repairs this spring and summer on the GSB following the recent ice shove event.

Yeah, looks like the usual warmer spots will make it into the 50s on Saturday.

The good news is that flood cutters with 50°+ temps and 2”+ of rain with a high snowpack are relatively rare events. Most of our winter systems outside the blizzard a few days ago have been precipitation challenged. The last really high profile one was on Christmas 2020 with the 40” snowpack around BGM. Before that it was January 1996. None of the reliable guidance are currently showing a very heavy rainstorm with inches of liquid at least for the next week. So looks like a slower melt at least over the next week.

It’s possible that the faster rate of warming since 2023 is related to a shift in the newly discovered PCC near Nino 1.2. Notice the current Nino 1.2 temperatures have warmed in recent weeks. The last El Niño in 23-24 also experienced earlier warming than past events as the Nino 1+2 warming was early also. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52731-6?utm_campaign=related_content&utm_source=HEALTH&utm_medium=communities Much recent work focused on whether equatorial Pacific cooling over past decades is driven by anthropogenic effects or arises from internally-generated climate variability, like the IPO. A definitive anthropogenic link to the recent trends would allow us to reliably predict a cooler tropical Pacific. As the tropical Pacific is known to be a climatic pacemaker, for (at least) the near-future this would mitigate global warming via ocean heat uptake and low-level cloud feedbacks. Instead, if the cyclic IPO dominates the recent cooling, we may expect a strong warming when it reverses. In support of the first possibility, we have identified an emerging climate change signal in the tropical Pacific across different observational datasets and we call it the PCC. The PCC has distinctive ocean-atmosphere dynamics that differ from those associated with the IPO. We further demonstrate that the recent trends during the satellite era, which have been the focus of significant attention, result from a combination of IPO and PCC. The emerging PCC SST trend pattern features a narrow band of cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific and warming elsewhere.

The big story in 1994 was the heaviest snows setting up in Central and Eastern PA due to the super gradient that winter. A number of spots set their all-time snowiest season. Several 100”+ amounts in the Poconos and Central PA .Those were the days of the big Miller As east of the APPS that we haven’t had in a while. It was the all-time snowiest in State College. PA LONG POND POCONO LAKE COOP 115.8 PA MONTROSE COOP 136.5 PA HOLLISTERVILLE COOP 132.1 PA SUSQUEHANNA COOP 113.9 Time Series Summary for STATE COLLEGE, PA - Oct through Sep Snowiest Seasons Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. 1 1993-1994 109.3 0 2 1995-1996 99.0 0 3 1977-1978 98.2 0 4 1992-1993 92.5 0 5 1960-1961 91.9 0 6 1969-1970 89.9 0 7 2002-2003 83.6 0 8 1963-1964 78.2 0

A piece of good news is that the models don’t currently have a heavy 1.50”+ rainstorm in the near future. The best outcome going forward would be a series of weaker lows like the current runs are showing without much total QPF. This way we could see many days with gradual melt with highs into the 40s and the increasing sun angle. Hopefully, a heavy rainstorm holds off until early March after the snowpack has had a chance to melt gradually.

Yeah, the GFS was #1 back to last weekend with the longer range forecasts and the AIFS was #2. In the shorter range it was the SPC HREF that did the best. For consistency across the entire season the best scoring models have been the AIFS and EPS AIFS. So it’s good to see the AIFS not having the suppression bias of the OP Euro and EPS with East Coast storms. Andrew has written an excellent article below. I would be curious if the outstanding winter forecast from the Open Snow team which Andrew is a part of used AI for their winter forecast. They didn’t mention it in the write-up back in November but perhaps they have a seasonal AI model that they aren’t ready to announce yet. https://opensnow.com/news/post/november-update-2025-2026-winter-forecast-preview

2-22-26 to 2-23-26 Central Islip 31.0 in 0140 PM 02/23 Trained Spotter

This was one of the better measured snowfalls considering all the drifting. It also highlights how these narrow deformation bands can cause significant variation over a very small distance. You can see the spread between the airport at Newark and the Harrison coop. Central Park was nearly identical to the Greenwich Village measurement After looking at our snowfall over the years some things stand out. Most snowstorms drop the heaviest snow either just west of the NYC-LGA-JFK corridor or to the east across Long Island. 2016 and 2006 were the rare times the heaviest snow was centered at one of these stations. My guess is that the northwest wall of the Gulf Stream to our east provides the natural focus for the very deep lows that track near the benchmark. Terrain interaction with the coastal fronts also lead to a snowfall secondary snowfall maxima somewhere over NNJ into Orange, Rockland, or Westchester. Weaker storms with marginal temperatures often favor areas to the west of NYC. So this has lead to mostly Islip and secondarily Newark for the snowfall leaders among the major observation sites. Greenwich Village 20.4 in 0230 PM 02/23 Public Central Park 19.7 in 0100 PM 02/23 Official NWS Obs Newark Airport 27.2 in 0200 PM 02/23 Official NWS Obs Harrison 18.0 in 0445 PM 02/23 CO-OP Observer

The SPC HREF had the separate band west of the Hudson idea but it verified a little further to the east.

It could be the terrain effects and placement of the coastal fronts and deformation bands around the NYBight. There is often a least one very heavy band that parks over NNJ and another across Long Island. The immediate area around Manhattan can get into some relative subsidence between the bands. The NNJ band this time was just west of the Hudson. But at other times with a storm track more tucked in near the coast it has been over Western NJ into Orange and Rockland. The December 2020 storm tracked closer to ACY than this one did and delivered 40” to BGM.