jayyy

Correct. It used to be that you could confidently bet that the GFS was too far SE with the boundary and the resulting storms that rode along it. You could account for a 100+ mile shift NW from what the GFS showed beyond day 4, especially when the EC CMC and NAM aligned on a further NW solution, and take it to the bank. Inside the day 3-4 window you knew that the GFS was going to pull that sucker NW. No two ways about it. Recent Gfs upgrades have been legit. A lot less long range fantasy snow, and a much more realistic progression at h5. I’d rather it that way. Getting your hopes up because the GFS showed a blizzard while other guidance had slop / rain rarely worked out in the weenies favor. The euro seems to have lost some its shine over the past several years. It tends to be too quick bringing cold air into the CWA, phasing features, etc. The pattern looks so close to being ripe around Christmas on today’s runs. But as PSU said, that may be a tad early for a biggie to hit. With that being said… we could still sneak in snow with some luck and good timing. Tend to believe it’d be more of a 2-4/3-6” type event early on the in pattern change progression .

Flakes flying again this morning. Sure, it’s not accumulating, but flakes in the air two days in a row!? Let’s go. My snow tv dendrite count may have already exceeded last year [emoji23] .

Nice to see some juice finally showing up on models .

Flakes be flyin’! Nice to see some snow falling for a change. .

Most of the overnight runs were fairly ugly / dry / warm for the next 2 weeks. Things can and will of course change a bunch of times over the next several days, but it’s looking increasingly likely that we’ll have to wait a few more weeks for a winter pattern to establish itself. No need to panic over it, as this is typical in a niño, but I was definitely hoping to sneak a threat in before the inevitable mid December niño warm spell. Once we get the - NAO / -AO in place, it’s just a matter of time. Still very optimistic about late December / early January and beyond. On the bright side, it appears that we won’t go full torch this time around.

Seeing how Baltimore just broke the all time record for consecutive days without at least 1” of snow, I think we’d all welcome seeing some snow fall from the sky.

44 & heavy rain

We were never forecasted to get sustained cold in early December though. The 6th-10th window has always been a “thread the needle” situation, as NWS and many on here have alluded to. Sustained cold is not forecasted to come until potentially late month, thanks to a -AO and reshuffling of the PAC via MJO moving into phases 7-8. Wouldn’t be overly concerned if the clipper and the subsequent wave around the 9th don’t pan out. The period around the 9th does seem interesting though, as today’s GFS alluded to. Still a bit too far out to get excited over a single OP run, but the potential is certainly there with a 1033 high to our north. As CAPE has alluded to many times, the environment seems ripe for a OV primary transferring to a coastal low scenario. Today’s 6z GFS gave us mod to heavy WAA snow from a LP tracking into the OV.

What? What does 61 today have to do with 6-7 days from now though? A day or two before? Sure, we can debate… But a week? It’s just not relevant. I’ve personally witnessed 40+ degree temp drops overnight before a major snowfall. That’s not to say we will get something major or see such a large temp drop… but it can be 61 on November 30th and snow 1-3” on December 6th lol. Especially for those of us with much better climo than IAD

Hoping for a nice little 1-2” event up this way if it does materialize. Elevation will be key

Hello streamers! Some light snow flying around early this morning in union bridge. Radar shows streamers as far south as Howard county at the moment.

Clippers still exist? I thought Alberta fell off the map or somethin’

Burn through peak climo? So, now we’re talking about February in November? Folks know Early to mid december isn’t even winter yet right? Let alone “peak climo” .

LR Weekly Euro control (one ensemble member) clown map? Oof. How far we’ve fallen [emoji1787] I’m sure it’ll show 20” tomorrow or some shit.

LES machine looks like it’s ready to finally crank up. LES Warnings and watches up all over the Great Lakes. The cold air, it be a’coming.. Shame we have to wait 2ish weeks for the PAC to become more favorable. That snowpack will erode pretty quickly as a result.

But we were still relying on things like perfect timing of phases, praying the SER doesn’t flex, ignoring the PAC, etc. for nearly 7 years out of sheer hope we’d get SOME snow. Yes, these are things we try to avoid every winter given our location, but when they are sustained / entrenched patterns? Good luck overcoming that. Sure, we saw a few brief windows where the pattern “historically delivered”, but they were extremely short lived and still required near perfect timing in the midst of an otherwise bad longwave pattern. That may work for Boston, but not in the mid Atlantic. Add in the impacts of AGW, and what used to be marginal snow at 32F is now more likely to be rain at 34-35. We typically need the boundary to our south, snowpack in Canada and the Great Lakes, etc to score around here. We really haven’t had much of that the past 5+ winters. Temps were what? +5 to +7 above normal last winter? How many sustained patterns (2+ weeks) have we seen where we had a +PNA and a workable NAO / AO / EPO setup? That’s just not going to cut it. Hoping it snows when it’s 50+ degrees out the day before and after a storm is not a recipe for success around here. Is it possible? Sure. Not likely. And certainly not likely when we don’t have the necessary mechanisms in place to bring cold air into our area. Not sure we can just chalk this up to “it doesn’t work like it used to” when we haven’t really had a prolonged period of favorable setups for the better part of the last decade. If we’re being brutally honest… we saw a pretty incredible stretch from 2000-2016 of above average winters and winters with at least one major snowstorm. Our luck caught up to us, and the accelerating change in our overall climo has been the icing on top. We can certainly have that convo if this winter doesn’t pan out - where we should see plentiful WC ridging, blocking, etc. .

Down to 29F at midnight. Temps forecasted to remain steady the next few hours. Nice to see some below freezing temps before met. winter for a change .

I can certainly understand why some folks are skeptical, pessimistic, sour, etc. We’ve been burned time and time again over the past 7 years. Besides one winter where extreme N MD did well, the past 7 years have sucked. HOWEVER… we spent majority of those years hoping we could thread the smallest needle. That we’d get a snowstorm during a somewhat workable window in what was an otherwise trash longwave pattern - particularly the god awful PAC situation thanks to a persisting la niña, among other factors such as a SER that always seemed to win out. For every positive we had, there were multiple negatives working against us. People clowned on PSU for being a realist when he’d say “hey, I know this looks good, but here’s why it could fail”. As it turned out, he was right pretty much every single time. We are in a completely different situation this time around. CAPE, PSU, Brooklyn and many others have taken the time to thoroughly explain the reasons why this winter’s overall pattern is vastly different than years past. Does it mean we’ll see an 09-10 type winter? No. Maybe we do get extremely unlucky again. Wouldn’t be the first niño to fail and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. But the weather doesn’t give a crap about our feelings. At the end of the day, science is the name of the game. It is and always will be the driving force behind our outcomes - good and bad. All we can do is analyze what we have in front of us and take it week by week. There are so many tools at our disposal and there is a wealth of knowledge on this forum after you sift through the BS. One of those tools should NOT be operational model clown maps 10-15 days out. If you are already souring on winter because the 18z GFS lost 10 inches of digital snow 300+ hours out, you’re doing it all wrong. This is, without a doubt, the best chance we’ve had in years to see some legitimate snowfall. This is the first time in nearly a decade that we will get to analyze the impact of GW on our winter climo during what *SHOULD BE* a snowy season. If we happen to see a +PNA -NAO - AO regime fail us in the midst of El Niño, then we can all move on over to the panic room. For now, we wait patiently. Have a good feeling that our patience (if you can call it that) will finally be rewarded.

Baltimore bullseye — what could go wrong? In all seriousness though… the longwave pattern is trending in a great direction for early to mid December. The -NAO seems like a lock at this point being only 4-5 days away. Very intrigued by the recent development of some models showing the AO tanking and staying negative for most of December. Couple that with a workable PAC (HUH!?), and we WILL cash in. There may not be a significant storm to kick off December, but I think we’d all welcome a nice 3-6” type event to kick things off. Have a feeling those of us who are well inland could even see a warning level snowfall before Dec. 15th if the advertised h5 pattern on ensembles holds firm. We should all know better than to live and die by OP runs 7+ days out - particularly the clown maps. I’m sure one of the OP GFS runs tomorrow will show a flush hit. Folks are going to drive themselves nuts living and dying by run to run 10:1 snow maps on OP runs. Watch the trends, not the clown maps. This will be the best winter we’ve had in 7+ years. That much is becoming crystal clear. Even if that bar is low, it excites the bajesus outta me.

Up at my aunt’s house in Schenectady NY. Some fatty flakes falling with accumulation before an expected changeover to rain overnight. Weather station back at home in union bridge showing just over 2” of rain and 53*F

If you end up leaving the area, you’ll find the QOH (quality of human) rating has severely declined everywhere. .

Didn’t the niño officially take hold in June though? We were still in a niña at the end of last winter through spring. So using the entire year as a reference doesn’t seem right here. Most mets I follow have been saying the STJ likely won’t get going until late November / early December. Have to imagine it takes some time for the longwave pattern to become entrenched and for things to unfold downstream for us. We also had a pretty wet September. Pretty sure dry Octobers during niño years isn’t super uncommon either but someone correct me if I’m wrong. Think it’s still a tad early to be either too concerned or too optimistic about our chances this winter. If it’s still super dry come thanksgiving through December 15th, we can revisit the possibility of a drier niño. One thing is for sure… there are a ton of different factors at play here. Some of which could drastically help us, some that could crush our hopes. We’ve discussed winner and loser niños at length in here over the past several months. All it takes is 1 or 2 things at h5 to be wrong for it all to come crashing down, or vice versa. I think the takeaway currently is that this is the best h5 / longwave pattern we’ve had going into winter for nearly 7 years. How it all unfolds is anyone’s guess. I feel like we have a 65/35 chance of success vs failure this year given our new base state, which is a helluva lot better than the dismal chances we’ve had during the past several / consecutive niñas.

We take. For the love of god, please no sustained -PNA this winter [emoji15]

Maybe we’re the 2023 Jets and manage to pull out a win over the eagles despite all of the obstacles we face!

Very true that we could end up in a super niño regime. Believe there are other factors at play though. Weak niños can still end up being dry / warm for the east and super niños can still end up being snowy and cold.