frostfern

Thunder-sleet seems to be a more common phenomenon. Had quite a lot of lighting with ice storms in Feb 2019.

Have to live somewhere with a north-facing hill then. Weird how it often makes a difference even after dark.

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 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.

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.

Yea. We got some of those in late May this year. When there was easterly flow during the blocking pattern there just wasn't enough moisture for anything to pop up. No easterly, but today winds were virtually calm and a pulse shower (no thunder) due to the lake breeze dropped an inch of rain at the airport. I'm only 3 miles away and there wasn't enough to completely wet the pavement. It just sprinkled a few huge drops of rain. With dewpoint near or above 70 showers that form are super efficient precip-generators. The problem is they form in one random place and don't move.

Yea. The rex-block really dried out the eastern great lakes. The block has finally broken down, but the jet is still too far north to propel any Wisconsin MCS into the Great Lakes. Light westerlies with little shear and no nocturnal low-level jet is a dry pattern for me.

I never said that. Just that the pattern sucks and it's getting dry here too, especially north of I-96 and east of 131 where the June 26 MCS didn't give much rain. It's frustrating seeing Wisconsin hog all the rain and thunder with this airmass popup pattern. It's not as dry as the eastern side of the state yet, but that's mainly just the fact that there was quite a bit of rain June 9 - 11. Since then it's been getting dryer and dryer here too.

Okay, but i's not the greatest year here either though. It's not full drought yet, but still boring as hell if you want t-storms. 2018 repeat. Have to wait until late August to get one of those good low-level jet-fueled nocturnal MCSs. On the east side of the state you at least have a shot at some afternoon storms. Here Wisconsin afternoon stuff inevitably eats shit when it hits the lake, and night stuff dies too with no low-level jet due to constant weak-ass synoptic pattern. I remember when heat waves used to have nocturnal convection. Recent times they have nothing but airmass shit that gets totally suppressed by lake-breezes.

Western Michigan is being lake shadowed to hell though. I can see it getting extremely dry if we don't get a single damn thunderstorm. These constant weak synoptic conditions with light west wind don't give any rain on this side of the lake.