cbmclean

I am a weather statistics aficionado with a special love of cold. If you are interested, the all time record for lowest surface temp measured on earth is -128.6 F at Vostok, Antarctica. The high plateau in the interior of Antarctica is far an away the coldest place int he world, beating the pants off of any place in the NH. There it gets down to -100 F regularly during the winter. -10 F is a warm summer's day.

The all time record for mainland North America is something like -81 F set in the northern Yukon back in the 50's. The atmosphere doesn;t appear to allow it to get that cold in NA anymore. Edit: Actually -81.4 F back in 1947 at a place called Snag in the Yukon.

I have seen it written that once you are left with counting on a SSW to save you, you are doomed.

When is the last time that a SSW actually lead to a cold outbreak in the CONUS? I can't remember one?

So in other words, not even 1 year ago. Less unusual than that poster made it sound. A Don Sutherland sighting in the madhouse that is the SE forum!

So I have learned alot about the AO, NAO, PNA MJO. How does the SOI affect us? Negative is good?

Can some one explain what the mic-dropping meme means?

I vividly remember the disappointment of that storm. What was the postmortem on that one? I mean I don't know if we saw one single flake in Greensboro.

"4. Forecasters need to do a better job of identifying/forecasting the location of the transition zone, and forecasted snow/sleet amounts need to be very conservative along this zone. Model snow maps are probably making us lazy, and worse, at forecasting snowfall. We are somewhat hypnotized by snow maps." To me though they already do a pretty good job trying to pound the idea of the transition zone into people's heads. I know for example Greg Fishel really preaches how variable snowfall can be based on that transition. I think one of the problems is that they still persist in showing maps with snowfall based on one particular prediction of where it will be, when in reality its is hard to pin down more than a few hours in advance. So more than a day out or so, they should basically show a whole state as the potential transition zone.

True: I'm just saying that at least once in recent memory winter actually was cancelled, pretty much for the whole lower 48. It was ugly.

After 2011 - 2012, I don't dismiss the winter cancel" gang out of hand.

The indexes aren't filling me with confidence. NAO predicted to dip slightly negative and then head back up. AO is all over the place in the forecasts, ranging from -3 to +3. PNA is actually expected to peak at about +1 on Monday and then head neutral or negative.

I have a 2.5 year old and a 4.5 month old so I definitely know what you mean. Here's wishing for a sustained NAO- for the both of us.

Don, where have you been? I have been missing your trenchant analysis!

The original packbacker statement was not so categorical, just a statement of concern at the position of the PV as modeled by the euro ensemble ( I presume the mean)

I wonder if thy just need to quit showing maps of predicted snowfall on a regular basis. These are basically equivalent to individual ensemble forecasts in that they give an idea of one possible outcome and nothing more.

I know, but its human nature that the grass is always greener somewhere else? (or in our case the snow is always deeper). By the way, what do they consider "decent" up there in terms of amount and frequency?

When you say "the tropics" do you mean the "La Nina-like" signature?

How important do you guys think the MJO is, compared to say the NAO or PNA? More generally if you had to rank the major teleconnections/indices in order of importance for Winter in the SE, how would you rank them (NAO, AO, EPO, PNA, QBO, MJO etc)

NCDC Averages for RDU for that period are 51.3/41.4/31.5. Overall, RDU was somewhere between +1 and +2 F for December (max temps on wunderground appear to be rounded to nearest degree, while NCDC gives temps to nearest 0.1 F). I didn't see it myself but my wife mentioned to me that one evening Greg Fishel mentioned that the despite the widespread perception that December was much warmer than normal at RDU, it was only 1 deg F, so that sort of meshes with my data.

I just used wunder ground to go back and look up the number for 12/17/2016 - 1/5/2017 and the averages for temps were (Max/Mean/Min) 56/47/37. The warmest max by far was 12/18 with 75 F which to be frank, I didn't really remember. Interestingly, both the day before and the day after were in the high 40's for highs, so that probably fuels part of the "muted" perception.

To me it looks like RDU was 2 - 3 K over which is 3.6 - 5.4 F. To be that's not a blowtorch, but then that's really just a matter of semantics. The deep south on the other hand...

I've been learning a lot while lurking while you guys chased this storm. So what is the story with how the PV affects winter in the southeast? Apparently a strong PV is bad if you like cold here?

Sometimes I fantasize about living in the snowbelts around the great lakes. The snow comes with the wind.

I find it fascinating that the Nina pattern is so strong when the nina itself is so weak; by some measures non-existent.