There was another storm later that month where ITH/BGM got destroyed I think with like a foot and the forecast was 1-3. I think it was a clipper that hit mostly the NYC area but some funky band formed up on the north side that nobody saw coming
The worst thing was nobody reacted that morning when it was evident the forecast was in serious trouble. There was insane rates of rainfall moving up the NJ coast and it was 35/26 or something in NYC and basically all everyone did was push the changeover time back when in reality no significant warming was occurring on a NE wind
Many people mistakenly think the WAA snow on Friday wasn’t forecast like January 2011 but it was actually forecast well. It was the temps that weren’t and so it was snow and not rain.
12/5-6/03 is one of the most underrated busts ever. The first part of the storm overperformed for NYC because SNE cleared out overnight ahead of the cirrus shield and the NE flow affected much colder and drier down ahead of the WAA precip than expected. Instead of the 38/35 that was expected it was 38/28. Then the second part of the storm that was supposed to be the main show was disjointed and produced virtually nothing
1-4-03 I vaguely remember as being a small event that had a mega gradient. NYC was all rain and 33 yet places like BDR/HPN/HVN snowed all day and had like 4-6 inches I think. It was somewhat like a 12/9/95 or 12/9/05
Usually when there’s blocking the tracks change less at day 3-4 but they still change. This whole evolution is going on early enough I think we might see things tick north in the next 24 hours for a few cycles then go back south again close to today’s ideas. I’m not sure this can really slide much more south
The UKMET and CMC basically look like March 2001 gradient as someone pointed out in the SNE thread or even 4/1/97 minus the bigger amounts in EPA and WNJ
That is such a rare sort of gradient to see. I’ve seen many smaller storms have gradients like that but the big ones usually end up 100 miles north or south if they have amounts that major. There’s no way NYC is seeing 3-4 inches in that setup. They’d probably see 0 or it ends up 100 south and they get 12
I think most of that precip the NAM shows after 75 is probably sleet. If we see any major snow it’s likely once the low gets going offshore. I think the initial bout of WAA is sleet or rain
2/8/13 was pretty bad. That setup probably couldn’t have worked if it occurred 4-5 weeks earlier. It was just late enough in the season that it didn’t kick too far right. It was fairly close to April 1982
The CFS is exponentially more accurate at day 25 than day 30. So if you’re looking at a forecast for 12/25 today it’s likely to be more accurate by a wide margin on 11/30 than today. I’ve seen cases where it flips 6-10 degrees on a 25 day forecast vs what it showed 4 days prior
It’s probably BS though. As a couple of those Twitter Mets have been saying (minus HM who has been very much on the cold train). Those recent flips back to a better pattern post day 10 on the EPS are likely not accurate if the MJO goes into 3-4-5 though if it’s a muted wave and the AO/NAO are negative perhaps it won’t be a shutout pattern
The whole setup is sort of similar to 12/19/95. That system didn’t track southeast, hence much higher amounts than this would produce but it was a product of a well timed blocked in an otherwise ugly pattern with marginal temps ahead of it
The AO has a better correlation in December than the NAO but we did have one fairly -AO December recently (maybe 2012) where for several reasons we ended up torching despite the -AO
Even prior to today’s charts showing that spike with the apparent immediate drop back down HM has been saying for about a week on Twitter he felt the AO rise was going to be brief and then go right back to negative. Today’s ensembles start showing that idea but still too far out to know
Eventually this winter pattern has to end. This would be what? 7-8 years in a row of this now. Figure we are due either this winter or next to see it switch to something else