PrinceFrederickWx

Monthly total 3.35" and 8 of the 10 days this month have had rain.

Nice workdays and crappy weekends, as usual for this region.

1 hour ago, EastCoast NPZ said:

Headed quickly into another drought. 

I feel like the massive disparity between your region and mine in rainfall (outside of winter) is somehow a feature of the new post-2016 normal. I don’t understand why though.

6 of the last 7 days here have had rain, and my monthly total is already 2.72"

On 2/9/2024 at 8:36 AM, PrinceFrederickWx said:

You know some of them will hold on to the bitter end. They'll be posting maps in mid-April when it's 85 degrees saying the pattern looks ripe in two weeks for a redux of April 28, 1898. 

I gotta be honest... when I wrote this last month, I wasn't thinking it would be Weather Will and Ji being the last two stuck holding the hot potato. 

25 minutes ago, psuhoffman said:

2006 wasnt bad...but if you adjust that season to the post 2016 warmer reality most of the snow from that season might end up rain. 

All I remember from that winter was a never-ending blowtorch with a one-and-done MECS in February that melted quickly (would that be rain now?)... but then I looked up December 2005 and on paper it does look pretty good. For some reason I forgot about that December. Honestly at this point just seeing advisory level snow in December like that would make me happy, I'm not even sure if we're capable of it anymore.

6 hours ago, Ji said:

I think people are being too lazy with regards to next year winter outlook. I bet it’s way snowier than we think . Study Nina’s after ninos

The sample size for this is way too small, and even still, I can’t find one that isn’t a dud other than 95/96.

1 hour ago, CAPE said:

This will remain the same through Spring and Summer. You swamp while he desert.

Exactly, from now until New Year’s Eve SOMD will receive approximately 100 feet of rain while the Shenandoah Valley receives one Planck Length. 

I got 1.33” total and @EastCoast NPZ got screwed… yep winter’s officially over 

2 hours ago, dailylurker said:

It's another tropical flooding rainstorm. One thing we do great in our new climo is tropical rain. It's killing off our oak trees at an alarming rate. Our forest are going to be full of invasive plants and trash trees. Forget the lack of snow. This shit is killing our forest. 

Heavy tropical rain and probably 50 degrees. 

Idk about oaks but IMBY has now been updated from zone 7b to 8a, which makes sense, as many firs and spruces that are only hardy to zone 7 struggle down here now. I unfortunately learned this the hard way IMBY. One of the local nurseries down here told me they have been changing their tree selections.

It certainly isn’t underperforming here, I have 1.14” and it’s still pouring.

I'm smoothing over a lot of months, but in my mind we've been through a never-ending torch since spring 2010, with just two pauses: a brief one in winter 2017/18, and a longer 15-month period from January 2014 through March 2015. That 15-month period impresses me the most nowadays, it's like something from over a century ago. How did we manage that amidst the secular warming trend? Could we ever do it again, I wonder?

9 minutes ago, WEATHER53 said:

That early March  one 5 or so years ago had like 26 hours of sustained at 40 and 36 hours gusting over 40

i can’t remember but the stats on that are crazy 

Yes March 2018 and that was definitely the craziest windstorm I’ve seen IMBY. Did a lot of damage to homes down here.

La Nina winters always end with an impressive windstorm in late February / early March, so this is no surprise either.

55 minutes ago, katabatic said:

According to NWS I’m in the 100+ inch zone at Donner. There is 3 extra bedrooms at this place…anybody wanna come and help me shovel lol 

I read this wrong at first and thought you were getting 4,500 to 5,500 feet of snow on Thursday, then another 2,000 to 4,000 feet on Friday, etc. By Sunday morning I think the snow would be stacked up into outer space. I think most here would be happy with that. 

4 hours ago, IronTy said:

Everybody seems to be really be piling into the idea that the next couple winters are going to be pretty crappy.  Given the (in)accuracy of the LR thread and people predicting epic cold as of late I would take this as a positive sign that we will surprise to the upside next winter.  

When JB finally throws in the towel and issues a blowtorch forecast for next winter then we can be assured of Nina snows.  And maybe that one really handsome twitter Met too.  He wasn't much use either.  

If next year goes cold and snowy then it would really prove my point about ENSO being overrated. I still think we’re screwed, but I might play contrarian in next year’s snowfall contest just for fun.

3 hours ago, psuhoffman said:

I think in some cases I didn’t weight the right factors enough and I didn’t correctly calculate how some would influence the pattern. 
 

I under valued the PDO. Severely. I also thought the pacific base state would mute the very strong basin wide nino into a moderate basin wide nino. Which is a good pattern. But what happened is we got a hybrid with the worst of both. The Nina like base state showed up with a western pac ridge. This acted to shift the Nino trough east so that it acted more like an east based Nino. It also supercharged the jet due to the compression between the western pac ridge and the trough to its northeast. This  continually flooded the US with pac puke. It also shifted the jet north and ran destructive interference with attempts at blocking.  
 

In summary we got some of the shitty long wave features of a Nina but with enhanced warmth of a Nino.  

I agree with all this. As I had said earlier in this thread, I have a suspicion that ENSO is weighted too highly and other factors are underrated (I’d put PDO and Pacific base state down as some of those needing higher weight too). It was a red flag to me early on when we seemed to get the same Dec. Pac puke pattern IMBY year after year, no matter what ENSO state we were in.

And FWIW, I’m an admitted climate doomer so you’ll get zero argument from me on the elephant stuff. I think we’re completely screwed but who knows, maybe I’m wrong?

22 hours ago, psuhoffman said:

Because we are in a -QBO strong Nino. Baltimore averages 42” of snow in -QBO moderate or stronger ninos. Even the median is close to 40”!  Every other category of seasonal pattern drivers is under 20”!   

What’s your sample size for a -QBO strong Nino? How do you know either of those were the reason for the high snowfall? How do you know it wasn’t something else?

I’m not trying to troll you. Just looking at this from a statistical viewpoint and trying to give you a possibly different angle. I’ve always had a problem with the bimodal distribution of ENSO (with weak Nina and moderate Nino allegedly being the best).

8 hours ago, RevWarReenactor said:

Thats fair. I have no issue with discussion on what might have happened or maybe they don't know.

The problem I have is when METS fall into the JB trap of making overhyped declarative statements like "its going to get cold" "Only a could more weeks until an epic pattern" "things look amazing" etc. They stick to their guns so hard that some belittle the naysayers (like me) who turned out to be 100% correct. We are not even allowed to panic in the panic room, we are just being too "negative" when again, we were 100% correct.

Then when so called "Epic" pattern doesn't materialize. They simply move on. Nothing to see here! It was just an "idea" and not a forecast! Like you seriously believed us LOL? Who even looks at LR forecasts anyway? Who even trusts that?

Then the cherry on top is claiming that they are rooted in "science" when the entire LR thread the last few weeks was essentially a story of fiction. 

Idk why, but the tone was much different here this season than in years past. I noticed the same stuff you did. It started back in Nov. with the “guaranteed cold” posts and ended with the “Feb. 2010 redux” debacle. The usual skepticism from years past (which was a good thing) was replaced with arrogance and outright weenie wishcasting at times.

I already used my once-per-30,000 day screen name change, but I wanna change my name to “PerfectTrackRainstorm” LOL

-The sample sizes for seasonal forecasts are probably too small, and correlation does not equal causation.

-ENSO may be weighted too highly.

-Persistence and trends are underrated as forecasting tools.

-In recent years there seems to be fads of tracking esoteric indices that may be meaningless (Siberian snowcover, etc.)

If any of you have any pictures of the storm that you'd like to share, I'd love to see them! I wasn't born yet in 1979 but I love reading about this storm. My mother has been through nearly every Baltimore-area HECS and still says 1979 was the craziest. She did have some pictures, but has been unable to locate them currently. If she ever finds them I will post some here.

FWIW, my 95-year-old grandmother has also been through every Baltimore-area HECS... she still talks about 1979 and especially 1942. 

16 hours ago, BlizzardNole said:

I experienced 1996, 2010 and 2016 in upper MontCo, and PD 1979 surpasses them all!  I was 12 and in northern Calvert which was the jackpot of the region with 30-plus inch amounts, reports of 6" in one hour, and 8 foot drifts.  My mom and a friend staying with us went out at the height of the storm at around 5 am to the street about 100 feet away.  They almost got lost coming back to the house and said it was snowing sideways so intensely, it was tough to breathe.  I got up around 6 am and the first thing I noticed was the deck banisters cleared off and asked why'd you clear those.  Mom says oh that's the wind....go look outside.  I just stood there in awe of a white hurricane with winds that must have been gusting over 60 and snow filling the air completely.  After the sun came up you could see how wild it was -- there are woods about 70 feet behind the house and you could not see them at all.  It was just a steady roar and whiteout.  After it was over there was an unbroken drift from the roof to the ground on one side.  Cars were nothing but lumps.

If I saw something like this here in the current subtropical wasteland of Calvert, I think my head would just explode. 

1 hour ago, WEATHER53 said:

I would venture that AI is going to formulate an analogue occurrent outcome data base from last 1-25 years and get into a more current and correct manner of evaluation, assessment and forecasts. Also ditch the 7+ day stuff, enhance the short term, destroy the floppy discs. 

The field I work in has seen so many advances in machine learning / deep learning in just the last few years. I would think a lot of the recent AI advances will eventually be applied to weather forecasting (if they aren't working on this already). Once that happens I would expect to see results dramatically improve.

59 minutes ago, jayyy said:

My cousins up in central NJ ended up with 12” despite a 1-3” forecast. Fuckers.

That area from Lehigh Valley to NJ/NYC just wins over and over again. Some of those areas climo aren’t supposed to be that much better than ours either. I have an opinion on that but it involves elephants we can’t talk about lol