SnowGoose69

Honestly the weeklies appeared iffy with the EPO...at least from the image I saw in the MA forum there appeared to be hints of smoothing indicating some appearance there could still be low heights in BC/GOA etc. As I said earlier today though, the deeper we go into winter I don't care if the EPO is +10 if the NAO is west based and -4 there will be significant snow chances and relative cold in the East. The NAO matters more and more as we go on and while the Pac does not matter less it tends to get muted more easily by a W based -NAO in Jan/Feb/Mar than Dec

It would not be the GFS if it did not lose a southern stream storm at some point in the medium range

True but I have to say I don’t recall a case in the last 22-23 years where I’ve really followed these indices where anything like this has happened before. Part of it is that December is probably the only month in winter where this type of alignment can occur and the pattern and air mass nature could suck this much, so you have narrow period to a degree where the stars can align. I think even in early to mid March this set of indices with a bad EPO would produce a markedly colder pattern than this. I think alone the W ATL SSTs being colder in March would likely cause less ridge bridging between that SER and the NAO ridge than we keep seeing models trying to spit out. Whether or not that comes to fruition I don’t know but they’ve been trying to show it

This is a classic pattern where a snow event will appear out of nowhere. It’s a combo of there being enough cold air around and the models really sucking badly beyond day 5 recently

Its not unusual at all to see a fairly crappy pattern in December and sometimes in early Jan with the AO/NAO negative. It becomes increasingly difficult on an exponential level for that to happen though once you progressive through January

The Op GFS had another “glorious” run at 12Z. It basically just continually repeats the same thing over and over Day 7-16 which is almost certainly wrong but it’s funny how many torch cutter Op runs it’s continued to have while the ensembles argue for something totally different

The Pacific is really bad til 1/1 which is partly why but models, especially Op runs can show patterns at day 7-10-14 that don’t look anything like the indices and ultimately correct as you get in closer. We saw that in recent winters where MJO was raging phase 5 and the AO positive and the GFS of Euro Op run at D10 thinks you’ll have -20 850s with a trof in the east

The difference this year is the -NAO is actually real in that over the next week it will be in place. I wouldn't be so sure the forecast on the EPS at 10-15 days of the -NAO are going to be fantasy as they have been most of the last decade.

the most shocking thing to me here was that Caribou never broke the record of 59F they set in February 1994 for the warmest meteorological winter day. I figured for sure that record had gotten broken in the last 25 years

I've noticed the GFS when we have favorable patterns in the East for cold has always had a serious bias to tend to want to pull the ridge back west and dump cold air masses into the west or Plains Day 8-9 and beyond. Its been showing that the last few days consistently and the EPS wants no part of it.

The last 1-2 days the Op GFS has pretty consistently wanted to torch the east and have a SER. Very bizarre because most runs it’s ensembles have disagreed

There is no cold air in place ahead of it and when the system turns up the coast down by Georgia there’s a low in Quebec, not a high. You wouldn’t get snow with that system unless it was vertically stacked as it passed northeast of the area. In that case there would be an area of snow behind it

The GFS pattern really looks 1980s like with the cold shots that keep ejecting south out of eastern Canada

We are pretty much due for a winter where everyone forecasts wall to wall torch and it ends up like 93-94. I don’t see much reason to assume that happens this year but it’s going to be hard to duplicate last winter. This is sort of the opposite of going cold and snowy in 94-95 or 01-02 after the preceding winters sort of had a ton of things break in a favorable way. It’ll be hard to get the ratter this winter we had last year again

If I remember right in December 88 the positive NAO killed us. There was probably 3-4 decent storms that came out of the Gulf but weren’t able to make the turn up the coast

It was a semi neutral after a La Niña though. Historically those have been terrible and we had a couple of more after that too including 11-12

And NYC will probably get more snow than they got last winter anyway. It’s almost impossible to get that little snow again. By accident we will probably find a 6 inch event somewhere

The 20Z HRRR got that 02-03Z MOB forecast very close. Had 90kts at 925mb with 76kts mixing to the surface

Has there ever been a case of identical US landfall spots occurring with 2 storms in the same year?

My first thought when I read this was 12/4/91 or the 1/16/92 bust but this one I don't remember.

The 12/26/93 storm was miserably and I mean miserably handled by NOAA/local mets etc. They completely abandoned ship off a slight shift east in the 12Z guidance that morning despite the fact by noon the radar along the DE/MD coast was clearly west of the 12Z models. I think all warnings outside Suffolk got dropped and by 3-4pm it was obvious the snow was coming straight up the coast. They ended up having to put advisories back up by 7-8pm.

That was dangerously close to being a catastrophe of a bust. The system started sliding more east than expected and nearly ending up missing a good part of the area. I remember that evening around 6pm sitting at home thinking this is really going to bust isn’t it? It ultimately slid far enough east that most of northern Jersey didn’t see major snows

The 5 boroughs of NYC were never under a winter storm watch one time from March 1996 til 12/29/00. That shows you how pathetic things were in regards to winter storms in that period. January 2000 because the storm snuck up on us at the last second they went straight from nothing to a winter storm warning otherwise the streak would have been 11 months shorter

I’m not sure if that LE was correct though. It is pretty darn accurate today at Central Park but I don’t believe there was an ASOS there yet then they were using some sort of old school home weather system for readings from October 1993 til July 1996 when I think the ASOS was put in so very possible that reading was erroneous

There was some pretty nasty dry slotting from about NYC to Nassau for a time. Quite a few places there saw only 16-22 inches or so. I want to say BDR only reported 17-18. We’ve definitely had some oddball measurements over the years at the airports and NYC. That Newark measurement on 2/11/94 I think most agree was wrong. NYC’s measurement on 1/22/87 I had an NWS Met tell me 18-20 years ago they KNOW was wrong. Recently we obviously have some real awful ones but even before 2000 we saw occasional sloppy reporting