bluewave

If it wasn’t for the strong -NAO, then record ridge across the Southern Plains would have expanded closer to our area.

Same with the GEFS and GEPS. I posted this in the main ENSO thread. In order to get really cold these days we need some kind of record warmth in the Arctic. If we can just get the storm track to shift south to a benchmark position in January, then maybe this can be our bounce back snowfall year which we have been hoping for.

While the week 2 forecasts have been running too cold from all the ensembles, the first week of January may be the coldest shift of them all so far. New run Old run

They do a pretty good job and also stream on YouTube if not included in some cable packages. The various weather channels going to other programming reminds me of MTV getting away from their core music video business and going to mostly reality shows.

It’s tough to get much snow near the coast with SW winds.

36° and plain rain here now. Interior sections of the Northeast are doing well with this one.

This is the first time in a while that the 11-15 day ensembles have had this much of a warm bias in the East. https://frontierweather.dtn.com/verification.html

I am located just to the east of the ASOS at Tweed. 35.8° here with light rain.

Probably related to the complexity of modeling long range interactions between the stratosphere and troposphere. My guess is that this was linked to the record low sea ice Kara and Barents seas. Very intersting paper below matches the current patterns around the Northern Hemisphere. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abc215 LETTER • THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS OPEN ACCESS North American cold events following sudden stratospheric warming in the presence of low Barents-Kara Sea sea ice Abstract While the relationship between the Arctic sea ice loss and midlatitude winter climate has been well discussed, especially on the seasonal mean scale, it remains unclear whether the Arctic sea ice condition affects the predictability of North American cold weather on the subseasonal time scale. Here we find that, in the presence of low Barents-Kara Sea (BKS) sea ice, sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs) can favor surface cold spells over North America at the subseasonal timescale based on observations and model experiments. A persistent ridge of wave-2 pattern emerges over the Bering Sea-Gulf of Alaska several weeks after the SSW onset, with a coherent structure from the stratosphere to the surface, which, in turn, is conducive to synoptic cold air outbreaks in Canada and midwestern USA. This highlights a planetary wave pathway relating to BKS sea ice changes, by which the stratospheric polar vortex impacts the regional surface temperature on the subseasonal scale. In contrast, this mechanism does not occur with positive BKS sea ice anomaly. These findings help to improve the subseasonal predictability over North America, especially under the background of rapid change of Arctic sea ice in a warming world.

Changed over to a mix of light rain and wet snowflakes here and 35°.

We have a shot at our first single digits of the season in early January near the coast.

34° and light snow here with a light coating on the colder surfaces.

We would have to go back to the 1970s or 1980s to get close to 25” from Newark out to Islip without at least a cat 1 NESIS KU event. This pattern is very unusual in that we are getting a strong ridge across the CONUS and a strong -NAO at the same time. So the Northern Stream is active for both rain like we saw last Friday and snow with the clipper before that. Have my doubts that we could get to 25” just on snowy clippers alone alternating with warmer storms and more rain or mix. I think it’s going to take a KU NESIS event to get us over the finish line.

We haven’t seen a clipper pattern like this in a long time. I am wondering if the benchmark KU track can become activated again at some point in January or February? That’s what we would need to get back closer to mid 20s seasonal snowfall.

Extreme temperature gradients in Asia and North America with multiple 4 to 5 sd jet streaks. Overall, the Northern Hemisphere is very warm for this time of year due to the warmth covering more real estate. So it will be hard to trust individual model storm details beyond 72-96 hrs. Since a tiny shift in the gradient between the strong 500 mb mid and high latitude blocking ridges can cause a big swing in local sensible weather. It’s looking like a very active pattern with the details to be worked out in the short term.