Carvers Gap

Just a quick break for me this evening. This is the 30d 500 map that the Euro Weeklies rolled with today....If we had BN heights east of Hawaii, it would be BBQ sauce(to quote the great Ted Lasso). But that is pretty much BBQ sauce right there as is.

2018...the rivers froze here. I may have had a pipe bust. That was one of those winters if it had snowed a couple of times, it would have taken a month to dig out. Good post. I added the CPC analogs above for today. I can never remember about 1977...it was stellar, right? If so, 70% of their analogs are from benchmark winters.

Did you see Cosgrove's comments on FB this afternoon? I would post them, but kind of feel like I shouldn't post his personal comments from FB. He was banging the drum.

Speaking of analogs, checkout the CPC's analogs for d8-14. Look at the ones which are double weighted. 19850109 20001227 19951229 19850118 19810103 19951224 19970110 19770121 19770115 20091221

This is waaaay out there, but....here is the run total. The run is even more impressive at 500. Happy Hour, indeed.

The 18z (at 500 anyways) is probably not a super realistic run. But holy Batman, what a block up top. That is a pretty extreme run.

Models have been dishing today. I won't go through all of the potential scenarios, but some really cold air masses are interacting w/ northern stream energy and/or southern stream energy. Pretty good table being set. Could it be a head fake? Sure, we live in the Upper South - that is the norm. That said, what is being shown on modeling is a pretty textbook setup for winter weather in the East.

18z w/ storm number one around d10.

Nice little snow mean(total run) on the 12 GEFS for portions of E TN. 5-6" of snow for TRI.

12z suite(Euro hasn’t run yet) has been pretty fun so far. The GFS has some extreme cold over the northern plains.

Awesome stuff! (I almost went running right there this morning!)

Merry Christmas to the best weather forum on the planet!!

I like when I have to look at the key to find out what value blue/light purple is. Is it too much to ask that MBY beats Columbus, OH, by 42-17 in seasonal snowfall? Things have to even out.

Will in a bit. Today and tomorrow my posting options are limited. I am hoping someone will post it!

The Euro Weeklies Control snow map.

The 12z GFS completely caves yet again. In fact, it almost pops a coastal storm during the same time it stubbornly had a storm over the Four Corners! It looks like most of our peak winter climatology will be reserved for likely cold weather. TRI sits at -1.3F BN through Dec 23rd. That departure will probably sneak slightly AN by the end of the month of December. January may will mirror December in terms of temp pattern progression. Sure looks to me like the cold January analogs are going to win the first three weeks of January. Could that change? Sure! Enjoy!

And this is why I don't sweat chinooks....and it is probably why Native Americans liked them and had a specific name for the event. In some translations it is "snow eater." Within just 10-11 days, the snow eater is vanquished on this model run. That is how quickly things can change. I grew up watching temps from International Falls, and guessing how long it would take to get cold in Tennessee.

Now, that is a trough.

The 6z EURO AIFS has the first cold front arriving early(edit) on January 1st.

The 6z Euro AIFS (can be hit or miss) is very cold. 15-20 degree BN departures during January is noteworthy if it verifies.

Looks like the GFS has finally sobered up after a week long bender to the tropics - i.e. it and its ensemble sees the cold now. I do think it might have been right that the second cold front around the 7-8th will be stronger. However, it now sees the cold front around the 3rd, and probably was badly wrong with that. Technically, there is also probably a cold front on NYE, but that one isn't overly cold. Overnight ensembles look in decent agreement. I do think we will have some warm-ups between cold shots. It looks like chances for wintry precip are increasing. Details at this range will be largely inaccurate, but there should be some fun model runs.

Ultimately, all models are getting to the same place which is a very cold North American continent. The 12z Euro AI looks like a good compromise. I have seen multiple comments across forums about the NA chinook wrecking January, and that it would take weeks to recover. That looks to be very incorrect. Look at the 18z GFS and the 12z ECMWF AIFS, and you will see how quickly NA can cool off. The Euro control is brutally cold FWIW. While I think there are concerns, I think we will find ourselves in a pretty cold pattern by the end of the first week of January. That has been a pretty consistent point seen by modeling for several weeks. The GFS definitely moved towards other modeling at 18z. I suspect we see some sort of cutoff in the southwest, but the good thing about that....cutoffs in that area can often kick out and create good things here.

The GFS is just slower by about 5-7 days at this point. It has been about a week behind on January for a while. Now, the one think to watch is it is trying to tuck a trough under a PNA/EPO ridge. That can happen, and we have seen it happen recently. There is a very slight trend in afternoon modeling to slow the trough in the Southwest, but again, I think the 12z GFS was and is an outlier. The 18z GFS has moved that trough along a bit more, but still leaves it back enough that the next trough digs right where it was.

@AMZ8990, if I was in you neck of the woods, I would be feeling pretty good about a winter storm in January.