SnowGoose69

00Z NAM at 84 may be headed towards something as far as the 23rd into 24th goes but nothing that looks too exciting.

That’s about the best setup for a SWFE you can get here. The energy crashing into the west prevents amplification of the wave and that’s usually how we avoid seeing the snow to rain classic SWFEs or see mostly snow. Any SWFE with ridging in the west typically will track over or to our north

The northern stream is fairly dominant. I’m surprised the Euro has held the events from the 24th-26th as long as it has. The GFS hasn’t really bitten once yet. Until it does it’s hard to get excited about it as the GFS historically handles these northern stream potential squash job setups better. It’s somewhat good seeing the UKMET at least showing upper level signatures though

The pattern isn’t even going to verify that horrible. It may be snow hostile but it’s not one that’s going to lead to temps in the 60s or 70s. The only places that look like they’ll persistently or almost persistently torch the next 10-12 days are mostly in the southeast

Didn’t we have an SSW last February that led to the March fiascos here? It felt like the impacts from that were almost instantaneously felt

Generally snowless Decembers don’t produce above normal snowfall winters here. I think prior to 2010 80% of winters where December saw less than one inch which DID finish above normal were El Niño winters. If you’re in a La Niña or neutral and you see no snow in December it’s generally a bad sign for the rest of the winter

One thing of note this year is that seemingly every big storm or even modestly significant storm at day 5-7 ends up happening. That’s classic El Niño. Think how often in La Niña or neutral ENSO winters a good 50% or more of those events end up never panning out

Even if it happened I’m not sure it’s snow anyway. The Great Lakes low is evident on most of the recent Euro runs and ensembles so the BL would likely torch. That is a classic just inland snow event where Newark and the Bronx get all snow and JFK is mostly rain

I still expect the Euro to lose the Christmas event. Northern stream is too dominant and likely will squash anything that tries to get going. GFS hasnt bit on it one run yet

Odds are we get both. It’s unlikely this coming pattern continues beyond 1/10-1/15 or that SOI continues behaving as if we are in a La Niña

The problem continues to be who knows where the SSW impacts. Remember there have been disastrous SSWs before where they impact Alaska or the western US and we go into a full blown torch. December 1990 and February 1989 I believe we’re both examples of SSWs that did this. Sometimes having it impact Europe or Siberia isn’t the worst thing for us because the entire polar region setup is disrupted hemisphere wide so we can still benefit here. Of course January 2012 is an example of one that impacted Europe and did nothing here at all

That system looks like a classic GFS win. The Euro is underestimating the northern stream impacts. I expect that washes out over the next few runs. The system the GFS shows after that may be legit but unless some sort of high is anchored in place ahead of it that will be entirely rain

The models blew that badly. Not totally surprising as back then the QPF on those events tended to run low but nothing spit out over 1-3 inches and places in NJ and EPA saw 7-10

It might but right now the tendency is for the next wave to lag just far enough behind it that it might be too warm anyway or cut over or west

This is somewhat 1980s like. We haven’t seen a December average marginally below average with little to no snow in a long time. It’s generally been easier to get brutally cold and dry patterns the last 25 years than it has been to get near to slightly below normal and dry. When we’ve averaged in that 0 to -2 range for 3-4 weeks since about 1993 we’ve generally scored somewhere

Op Euro has nothing 23-25 tonight. Does look like it’s developing something on the 25th south of the Oh Valley but given pattern it would probably cut. The system on the 22nd is a massive digger with more cold air than this one. May snow into the Deep South with that one and it could act as a 50/50 if something comes behind it 23-25th

The FV3 at 384 is close to the opposite. No -NAO though and PV is practically at the NP but there’s a massive ridge off the west coast and an Aleutian low

Solar spike was believed to have killed that winter. Things went highly zonal overall and the AO and NAO were raging positive. I want to say that for a good part of the winter some sort of weak troughing was in the east but the relatively zonal pattern out west and lack of any -AO and NAO meant no cold air was around

11-12 I think was a neutral or weak Niña. It was similar to 01-02 in that nobody really knew why it ended up sucking as bad as it did. By that I dont mean nobody knew what features caused it to be bad they just had no idea why the features setup the way they did given the setup argued for something different both years headed into those winters.

I think this is completely another model. They ultimately decided against changing the name to make it easier for people I believe but this is really not a GFS upgrade this is about as new a model as we’ve seen since probably the ETA in 1994

14-15 largely resembled the issue we are having this year and with a couple of other years (I believe 12-13 and 13-14) in the last 8 years where we thought we would get an El Niño 8-12 months in advance and either they didn’t develop or they were muddled like 14-15 was. The PDO had gone negative back in those years and it dipped again for a time last winter and early this year which may or may not be a reason why we have this decoupled mess of an El Niño right now

If I remember right that was the storm which was a great example of a -NAO hurting us because it ultimately slowed the timing of the phasing shortwaves when without it the system may have been flatter and less phased. Even up here we lucked out getting a minuscule area of heavy backend snows otherwise we actually finished that month below normal in snow. I believe that on the 71-90 climo we were using then that 5.5 inches was our now normal snow in December and we got 5 on 12/5/02.

I’m almost sure we saw similar things in ensembles a couple of weeks preceding last winter’s warming event that seemed to contradict would should occur and sure enough in the end all the ensembles that indicated mild ended up wrong

I’ve tended to notice more often than not those gradient patterns either end up verifying as full blown torches with a SER or you end up with a massive trof in the east. It’s unusual that it verifies beyond week 1

They want to blame LASIK but I don’t know. Having researched it heavily myself years back and ultimately opting not to do it the vast majority of the suicides tend to occur years later when it’s apparent there is no hope the side effects will fade. This was well inside the 6 months recovery time. It sucks that it seems nobody around her knew something was wrong. Similar to my good friend who recently committed suicide. Only sign was one of those realizations after it happens. He was texting me way more than usual in the weeks proceeding it but I never thought much of it at the time