J.Spin

Yeah, PF and I have talked about it before, but the mountains can definitely bring you to another level in terms of precipitation amounts and consistency. Our site here is the perfect example: we’re down in the Winooski Valley at fairly modest elevation, but in terms of snowfall and total liquid, this area punches way above its weight. It’s in large part due to the proximity of the local mountains (with maybe some extra help from being downwind of the Great Lakes). Compared to BTV at roughly the same elevation ~15 miles to our west, we seem to get about a 50% increase in annual liquid, and >100% increase in annual snowfall due to the higher ratios of upslope snow. Mother Nature is still rolling the dice of course, so nothing is guaranteed in the short term. But it’s sort of like playing with loaded dice, and over the long haul you get a big boost in snowfall and total liquid equivalent. It certainly helps protect the area from those dreaded New England “droughts”.

Yeah, I can’t imagine needing A/C at this point in our climate, and the fact that a window units interfere with normal use of the windows is another huge disincentive all summer long. While we were in the 70s yesterday, was I reading it right in the main threads that SNE was getting into the 90s? That’s nuts. Thank god we live here, or glad we don’t live there, or however that goes. Our forecast of highs generally struggling to reach 80 and lows struggling to be above 60 is fine by me. My older son and I went for a long ride in the Adams Camp complex yesterday and the weather was excellent – that’s a direct example of the benefits of the current weather because we wouldn’t have done that on a day with temperatures approaching the 90s with potential humidity. Hopefully visitors to the area are appreciating the weather as well for their activities. The only thing it’s really not great for is swimming, which was a bit evident as we passed one of the pools along the Mountain Road and I saw a guy obviously having to keep himself warm as he stood beside the water.

As delightful as that sounds, it would be sad to miss out on those beautiful October days with white in the alpine fading to snow-covered foliage below, and those October ski days with their unique, ephemeral vibe. It’s tough to get those experiences without at least some below average temperatures and systems coming through.

LOL, indeed, when you see such an arbitrary number chosen it also creates a bit of a “who cares” feeling. Now if they’d chosen >= 60 F, that would be different. Everybody knows that when nights only drop to 60 F you’re talking just marginally comfortable sleeping, but once the temperature drops to 59 F… pure bliss.

When I look back on the winter and give it some sort of rating/grade, it’s snowfall that is the main factor, so my rating is pretty simple. Snowpack is important though, so I’ll used that a bit to tip the scales one way or another if the grade is on the edge. But like you, I absolutely expect continuous snow cover throughout the winter at our site, so lacking that would be a big deal and it would/should indeed affect the perception of the season. The mean duration for the continuous winter snowpack here is 135 days running from the beginning of December to the end of March, and even in the worst of seasons it’s only dropped to 90 days. When I just checked the data, I was surprised to see that the abysmal 2015-2016 season wasn’t the low mark for snowpack duration here. That season’s very low snowfall still produced continuous snowpack for 103 days, and instead it was 2011-2012 with the 90 days because of a relatively late start near the end of December and what must have been a very warm March melting out the snowpack early.

On that note, I’m sure many resorts will only report last year’s snow totals through the point at which they shut down, so they’ll be missing any snow that fell after that.

That’s an excellent point - New England really does have quite the winter climate gradient if you think about going from the southern coast all the way up to northern Maine, or even just the northern mountains. Relative comparisons do seem to shape one’s perception of their local weather.

What I’ve observed here in the forum is that judging the quality of a winter is very subjective. I’m sure people can bring up specific examples from last season, or other seasons, but it seems possible for people to receive near average snowfall and still rate the winter as well below average. To some degree, it seems that what people want is consistency, or they want the snow to be around when they want it to be around. Realistically, one has to go pretty far north or up in elevation to have consistent snowpack on the ground all winter. As one heads further south and winter snowfall variability increases, snowpack that comes and goes throughout the winter, and the back and forth of cold storms followed by warm storms, is actually the “average”, or even the “normal” climate. People don’t typically seem to be keen on that back and forth in the winter though, even if that’s the typical climate. In areas with high snowfall variability there can still be periods where snowfall/snowpack can be much more consistent, and I think those get incorporated into part of the climate perception, making the inconsistent periods seem worse than they actually are.

PF, you would probably love the scenery in the film Ex Machina if you haven’t seen it. I’ve heard the location is meant to be Alaska, but they shot it in Norway at the Juvet Landscape Hotel. It was quite stunning, so I looked up the location as soon as I saw it, but the first minute of this video talks about the location and shows some of the scenery:

Yeah, I always figured that season was likely to be near that bottom of what we’d typically see for seasonal snowfall around here… that was until the insanity of 2015-2016 happened.

Well just checking the layman’s listing of La Niña years, the ones during the period in which I’ve got snowfall records are shown as: 2007–08, 2008–09, 2010–12, 2016, and 2017–18. I’m not sure how to incorporate the one listed as just 2016 (did it just happen during part of the year or the summer? Which “winter” does it go with?), but for the rest of them, snowfall at our site was as follows: 2007-2008: 203.2” 2008-2009: 179.4” 2010-2011: 197.0” 2011-2012: 115.3” 2017-2018: 167.2” There are some pretty heavy hitters in there, and only one below average season in the group. The average snowfall for those winters is 172.4”, which is more than 10% above the overall snowfall average in my data set.

In my experience in this area, upslope snow can be tough to quantify specifically because of the way storm cycles often simply transition from the more synoptic snows into “upslope” snow without an obvious demarcation. To try to give a sense for the relative amount of upslope from one season to the next, we usually just have to go by some subjective level of “feel” based on our experiences over the course of the season. PF is pretty good on that though with the way he is out on the mountain almost every day during the winter. In general, I feel as though I’ve liked La Niña seasons up here – some mixing in systems, but we’ve often had lots of moisture passing through the area. I can look at my data to get some numbers though – which seasons are we considering to be La Niña (and does weak/moderate/strong matter)?

I’ve always taken these “summer’s back is broken” testaments as very locally/regionally oriented, because the farther you stretch them out to say global, hemispheric, or even CONUS scales, the less sense they make. I don’t even really have a perception of what the expression means for places like San Diego or southern Florida, and if it has any meaning at all in those places, it’s likely to be at a very different time of year. I get that one can look at the overall longwave pattern and note when there has been a dramatic seasonal switch, but it’s still going to typically produce regions that would seem to go in different directions with respect to seasonal progression. I’ve only used the expression in the context of the NNE, where at this point in August if we’ve got forecasts going out the next week or two with highs in the 70s F and lows in the 50s F, we’re done with respect to high summer. Once we’re past that window of time, we’re almost into September, and there’s really no going back to extended periods of 90s F and high dews at that point up here. The term is of course ridiculously subjective and loaded to begin with, but my perception is a lot of people use it quite regionally.

I agree with @tamarack about Saddleback’s snow quality as likely the best in Maine due to the upslope component, and the reported annual snowfall averages from the state’s largest resorts would argue for that with Sunday River at ~155”, Sugarloaf at ~200”, and Saddleback at ~225”. On that same note, I seriously think that the Dixville Notch/Balsams area would get that prize in New Hampshire. It’s likely that Mt. Washington itself has greater raw snow/liquid equivalent numbers up above 4,000’, but the beating and wind scouring that the snow gets up in those alpine elevations is so extreme that the quality often takes a hit. And of course, skiing up in that alpine terrain with the combination of winds, temperatures, and deadly terrain hazards is really not an option for most people. Wildcat and Bretton Woods, which are literally right there in the Mt. Washington area both report ~200” a season, and Balsams seems to report ~250”. It’s really hard to get reports from people skiing that area (I think visitation was always sparse even back when Balsams was operating), but it’s got great latitude and potential for upslope, and it really feels like the snow quality should be way up there. I think elevations top out around 3,500’ there, so that’s a touch lower than the peaks of some of the resorts, but it feels like it would come in just a tier behind the Northern Greens (maybe akin to the Central Greens) for snow amounts/snow quality. With the terrain there, I bet the ski touring is really nice in spots where tree spacing is sufficient. If the ski footage they used in their promo video is actually from the Balsams, it certainly shows promise. You can see that one shot at 1:07 where you’ve got that upslope-style snow stuck to every deciduous branch. You typically need upslope/backside snow, and protection from the wind to get snow deposition like that.

Once we hit August 1st, it’s always good to be on the lookout for the breaking point of summer around here, but I wasn’t quite ready to call it back during that first week because that impending mini stretch of heat that we had on the 10th and 11th was still approaching. You definitely started the fall party though. I’m not sure about SNE of course – based on what I’ve seen on here over the years they seem to hold onto the big heat potential much longer. In our area though, it’s hard to imagine top tier heat coming back based on the extended forecast. It looks like temperatures will struggle to even reach 80 F, so 90 F is obviously a long shot.

Exciting – I’d say those are all solid choices for a potent NNE experience, especially in the winter department.

In one of the main threads they’re already talking about how it can be hard to get 90s F in SNE at the end of August, so you can imagine how insanely hard it must be to do that up in your area. As Ginx says:

That map looks pretty good for what I hear the resorts like – solid accumulations for the mountains, with potentially minimized travel disruptions in the big cities to allow people to travel to the snow. I think that storm produced great turns in some cases, but it also brought a lot of wind in spots that reduced the quality of the powder.

It’s good that the indoor/outdoor thing was cleared up, but the bolded is where this still seemed to go off the rails. Just like someone heading to the Rockies, your typical vacationer is not coming to the mountains of NNE to experience sweaty, 70 F nights. Ironically, that’s what would ruin the vibe. The typical vibe for summer in the mountains is warmish days with modest dew points where you can swim, kayak, hike, bike, etc., then cool evenings where you may put on a hoodie, hang out by the fire etc. People often come up to get away from having to spend the entire day and night in the A/C, and instead maybe sleep with the windows open to get some fresh air for a change, or be able to sleep for the night in their tent without sweating their arse off. If someone is staying in a hotel, having A/C is certainly nice, but it’s hard to imagine the tourists coming up to the northern mountains expecting the vibe to be thick, soupy nights where you can cut the air with a knife. I know @powderfreak has interacted with plenty of visitors to the area, so he may have a sense for what they’re looking for/expect.

The confusion might just be caused by localized or regional differences – those sorts of temperatures and dew points might not happen until later in the fall for posters from other parts of the country. So it might feel like you were calling for first frosts and cool autumn weather.

Yep, August in NNE.

Apparently it’s not just the grounds crew; they’ve already released shots of the home team warming up…

I saw some of that in my point forecast, so I took a quick look at the BTV NWS forecast discussion and their thoughts are the same. I could swear I’ve heard in the subforum that HHH is what everyone wants in the summer, but maybe we’ll just have to make due with “comfortable” for now. Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service Burlington VT 304 PM EDT Tue Aug 11 2020 .SHORT TERM /THURSDAY THROUGH FRIDAY/... As of 304 PM EDT Tuesday...By and large though, the majority of the time period should be dry with partly sunny days and mostly clear nights. Temps turn back towards seasonal norms with highs in the upper 70s to mid-80s and lows mainly in the 50s. Dew points will be comfortably in the 50s as well. .LONG TERM /FRIDAY NIGHT THROUGH MONDAY/... As of 304 PM EDT Tuesday...Sunny days and clear nights are expected, with temps very comfortable in the upper 70s to low 80s, and lows in the 50s Saturday, and slightly warmer in the mid 50s to low 60s Sunday.

We were at the Alpine Mart in Stowe yesterday afternoon/evening after our Mansfield hike, and just as we were parking the car along the left side of the building, this huge black bear was sauntering along heading westward out there in the back yard of the store. The boys thought it was just a huge dog at first, but then did a double take when they realized it was a bear. I told them it wasn’t at all surprising based on all the bear sightings you’ve been talking about in town this summer, and then I proceeded to show them some of the interesting bear pictures you’ve posted as we were driving home.