frostfern

LOL. Since when do we care about accumulation on salted roads. I assume most of us are not the age where we are praying to get days off school.

Had a virga band sitting overhead all afternoon here. Mix of virga and filtered sunshine.

It's definitely dry here at 28/18. Was hoping to add at least a little to the snowpack. It looks like the backside deformation zone will be closer to you later tonight into tomorrow morning. Here the front end is all we're going to get as the upper low is forecast to fizzle as the energy transfers to the mid-atlantic. I'll be surprised if I eek 2 inches from this. You'll probably do a little better as you'll at least have a decaying deformation band overhead for a little bit of time.

Hopefully adiabatic cooling can force the line back south if the lift intensifies.

There is a lot of low-level dryness. Areas closer to the lake seem to be overcoming the virga onset quicker.

The front end is 100% virga here so far. There's been some radar returns aloft for a while now but the low level dryness is eating it all on the way down. Not that I'm expecting more than 1-3" here.

I can skip any repeat of the February 2019 ice-mageddon. Did a number on my poor trees. Just give me snow damnit.

Hoping we finally get into a classic clipper train with arctic intrusions after the rainstorm on the 4th. It's been a long time. Lake ice on Lake Michigan is still minimal so enhancement looks good.

It's been remarkably boring. Maybe set a record for the amount of non-sticking 35 degree snow lol.

It's the same thing a lot of places this year. Good totals in the mountains but not much elsewhere due to marginal boundary layer coldness. The Adirondacks got dumped pretty good too.

Well, it looks like it will at least be less of a snooze-fest than the winter so far. It looks more like a roller-coaster-ride than a winter lock-in though.

Surprised I didn't make people salty saying I'm happy to get some LES from this. The phantom synoptic event on the ECMWF messed up the Christmas Eve LES scenario by turning the wind too northerly as happened almost all last winter. I think last year set a record for the number of completely snowless cold outbreaks here IMBY. It made me understand Chicago people better. Here in the snow belt cold usually comes with some snow but last year was really frustrating.

I actually prefer the GFS. Rather get rain on Christmas Eve followed by an arctic blast out of the west that's guaranteed to give at least some sticking snow than a thread-the-needle synoptic event with the low deepening too far east for good lake effect. Last year was just awful in terms of zero notable lake effect events in West Michigan... then a couple unwanted wet slops well after the first spring thaw. Ugh.

Decent wishcast for GRR. The last one that looked like this at this range dumped 2" of rain and zero accumulating snow though. Previous runs had better lake effect events for me on Christmas day. Would really prefer the main low to move closer to James Bay for westerly cyclonic wrap-around. This coastal-low dominant crap brings cold with little LES.

Yea. I don't think it was a situation where there was a deep warm intrusion aloft as there was not much in the way of sleet or mixed precip anywhere. The lowest km or so just needed to be a few degrees colder and it would have been a very significant dumping. I was holding out hope that the models might be wrong but no such luck. Perhaps if the same pattern had occurred later in the winter with an established cold boundary layer in place. I remember March 2, 2002 was a decent surprise wet dump of snow.

Not sure. I think it was just a sharp gradient. GRR and MKG also got narrowly missed. Frustrating as there was a lot of H2O coming out of the sky. It just never changed over, not even towards the end. When the temperature finally got below freezing the precip stopped. Maddening.

I think the northern periphery will make up for the lack of triple digit temps with horrible humidity. Missouri and Iowa are going to see the highest actual temperatures because it's been dry there.

Ridge is delayed a few days now. Tuesday cold front looks stronger and wetter maybe. I think when the ridge finally builds it will have soupy humidity with it... so nasty heat index values. Mid-to-upper 70s dewpoints and low 90s looks more likely than triple digit heat.

I finally did good. Parts north and west still didn’t get anything though. Waiting for the rain to the west. Hopefully it at least gives the lakeshore counties a good soaking. Hope it still has convection late. MCSs typically become stratiform by morning with such weak shear. There’s a good low pressure with it so maybe it will hold together despite skinny CAPE and weak shear.

Slowest moving MCS ever over Lake Michigan. The lake doesn’t need anymore water. Such a tease.

There was lots of thunder here, but it was almost all soft rumbles from the middle part of the cloud. It don’t know what it takes to create a lot of CGs. I kept watching the rain shafts for big strikes but they never came. Just flashes and soft peals.

Well it finally rained good IMBY. 0.8” at least with a string of training cells. Still pretty hit and miss though. Hope the bigger MCS to the west makes it here too.

Nice isolated storm inland from Ludington. I cloud see the tower blossoming up through the haze from here. I thought it was much closer. It seems like storms can pop up closer to the lake there because there's significant hills. Southern Lake Michigan is surrounded by flat so it's hard for anything to pop up.

I think there will be SE diving ridge-rider MCS activity at some point. The problem with this stagnant pattern is the showers don't move very fast. They pop up in one location and rain themselves out, so instead of a 0.25" spread over a general area you get an inch falling over an area of a a few square miles and nothing nearby. I notice a lot of little mesoscale micro-climates with a pattern like this here in Michigan due to slight terrain differences. Storms like to pop up near Jackson and Ann Arbor because there's a slight ridge there. There also some pretty high terrain west of Cadillac in the northern lower peninsula that's been getting showers almost every day. Low areas and areas too close to bodies of water miss most of the time.

Good. Maybe there will be a chance of ridge-riding complexes turning right / driving SE into the heat. I'm so tired of this hot dry pattern with the jet up in Canada and organized convection confined to the northern border.