Typhoon Tip

You're asking for an analytic perspective through an emotional/neurotic filter - For the general: The GGEM and GFS are not altogether very appealing, though still the take away is that there is a system to monitor. The Euro is arriving, interestingly ...better, for winter enthusiasts... The variability in the 850 mb thermal layout, and in fact ...the totality of it across mid and lower latitudes of N/A through next weekend, is part and parcel headaches in a spring pattern. One run adds a degree...the next shaves. Cold rain and cat's paws, then the next run becomes a grid concern... and around and around we go. Live by spring lows ... die by spring lows. Obviously we are not technically "in" spring, but that doesn't matter to the vagaries of the wind. It's spring this week, it may be winter next month, regardless of silly human conventions ...etc..etc.. But it is not atypical to spring "bowling" season, to have these lows pocket their own critical thickness and it comes down to timing dynamic pulsation and other nuances as to whether parachutes or more are realized to the surface. This Euro's track at 500 mb is a climo gem for big snows, ...and the slow movement and the cooler 850 mb profile by ~ 2 ticks across the board, is a critical difference and this solution bends conifers and sags power lines most likely.

Some minoring concern there for data sparseness/assimilation techniques. The Jan 26 governing mechanics in the E, are still almost full-body contained over eastern Pacific region. Teleconnectors can be used to offer "correction vectoring," but as I opined yesterday ..those are iffy at best for present employment. The climate prediction center's ( and probably EPS dervatives as well ..) PNA as of last check, they are/have been indicating mode change. Rising -3 or so SD to nearly or slightly above 0? Not a huge deal, no .. but significant enough to throw some questions wrt to amplitude down stream. The PNA is a massive domain region, and if the western side of it is pulling the index downward, we may be at a loss as to the scale/degree/anticipation over eastern N/A. Adding to that, the 'relaxation' and receded HC stuff, shortening wave lengths installing more curved field, as well, reduction in ambient geostrophic velocities ..it all sends determinism into uncharted waters. Probably this sounds more daunting than really is... just be leery as Will was also mentioning. From orbit this thing is really not a slug of identifiable S/W accessing a physical kick-back from R-wave redistribution blah blah constructive interference – although I am noticing a 70 to 80 kt wind max more identifiable very recently in the runs. Otherwise, S/W fragmentation amid an amorphous sort of meso-synpotic L/W that seems to coalesce one, given time. Due more so to 'emergence' of where/when said constructive interference will begin to take place.. sort of mid MV to upper MA...seemingly ideal. Lot to take in there... sorry. I still feel pretty strongly that this system's merely missing the N/stream insert at a critical/climo timing to really gin up .. If only! But even so, I'm noticing that about 2/3rds of the guidance, regardless of species/type, are shedding ~ 4 to 6 dm of heights off the 500 mb core as this lifts from the lower OV across the upper MA and possibly ( finger's cross ) along that critical 1 to 3 deg of latitude S of LI – typical snow route. And if the mid level heights are indeed falling while that happens... that's a potential red flag. Thinking aloud here.

Man...if we could just get a little N/stream insertion... that'd probably take that to the next level really fast -

You could tell two days before that happened up there they were doomed. That system was hemming and hawing all week in the GEFs members and most in here ignored it in lieu ( at the time ) of the last nights, which turned into an overrunning thing, stating it was too insignificant. Ha. Well, down our way it certainly wasn't memorable, but I thought it was fascinating that while popularity had it ignorable, that little 1.5"er that swept through here pre-dawn was converting in the models to a monster - no one mentioned... I let it go. Oops. Man, absolutely went through some extraordinary B-gen kinematics NE of the Benchmark, and just as modeled ... it drove a freak CCB jet anomaly around the NW-W-and even SW arcs of the core. Really fantastically modeled... unsung hero - The standard graphics couldn't handle the pressure packing and it was like a sharpie was applied to weather chart. Gee, maybe the mid trop, 2,000 naut mile long, by 300 naut wide wind stream at 130 kts punching off the upper M/A isn't such a hot idea, huh - that's probably 5th time I've seen an obscene 500 mb jet max that strong this season. Meanwhile last night's event... piddling and barely pedestrian isn't nearly as memorable. Or is it...I dunno

That's funny you mention that, because that's what I was not really wanting to get into after the lengthier expose earlier - one diatribe a day is all the collective attention span has the patience for ..haha... Seriously, that's very close to getting us into one of those total troposphere E anomaly deals. GGEM hints at closing 250 mb. When ever you have that thick of a tube of mass moving into a baroclinic instability that's marginal? That's where you get your grid failures and a couple days waiting for the n-guard to bring in pack choppers. That's what'd be if that '92 happened on cryo climate. I don't have a problem with bandying comparisons ... In a way, you could throw April '97 into that mix, too. Deepening ( not filling ) ULL with concatenation of multi-sigma level isohypses is a destablizing column that really revs the QPF machinery.

That JMA run would rock chairs in late life yore -

Just a quick reminder ... the 25-26th has been showing up among the individual GEFs members with > 50% recursion rate/cycles for days. Either in the form of weaker antecedent mechanics leading pallid coastal lows, to outright bombs, the persistence is weightier than the individual messages I've also noticed this morning off the 00z cycle, the EPS was a colder profile ~ half way through the cyclonic envelope/translation of it, with subtantive sub-850 mb in thermal layout/structure to argue a legit colder profiled totality over the operational version. Obviously early speculation ..but mutable at this sort of extended lead. Marginal/spring blue bomb speculation across 2 C differences are small numbers, but with meaningful implications to put it nicely. We are into climo mid trop ...even +1 C over marginal 6 K thickness is easily doable. The GEFs mean was also well SE of the operational GFS thus also concomitantly colder because of that. Just some notes - We are in a bizarre hemisphere wrt to teleconnecitons. The PNA at CDC/ERSL's version is demonstratively out of sync with the CPC numbers. Now..these sources will seldom be 1::1 correlators per se, due to the differing EOFs methods - one being llv wind flux anomalies, the other being mid level geopotential height anomalies, respectively. However, the differences - presently - strain credibility even factoring that in. Not sure what is causing the CDC to be so demonstratively posotive in the PNA, when the CPC values, altho do show a mode correction, stalls the rise around neutral departures only to flat line the index with remarkable agreement all the way out to the end of week two like that. I almost get the feeling - in part when factoring in the MJO failure ( apparent ) to move the robust wave signature deeper in the Phase 7/8-1 ..) that the HC is still lurking and imposing an influence, regardless of modeled heights appearing to have eased off along the southern girdle below N/A. It's as though the Pacific domain is being guided by super aggregate index/constructive interference for +WPO/AA N pac/+EPO, and to do so on very large planetary scale, argues a majestic factor - the only thing I can think of capable of doing so would be the Hadley Cell invasion into the lower Ferrel latitudes - which by papered/peer reviewal is unfortunately an amorphous boundary of it's own, as in ill-defined because of ablation effects where it terminates into the mid latitudes/westerlies. So it is hard to pin-point much less plan around. Operationally though...I find it difficult to use/employ the CDC/ERSL either way/causality aside. The -3 SD PNA rise to +0.25 of the CPC may be enough to excite some sort of weak Archembaultian thing but that's not an altogether strong signal either. Regardless of all, small frets and starts of -EPO pulsation has been loading some cold into Canada, as this recent presaged air mass to the 4-6" overnight loaded ultimately into the local space and set stage rather nicely timed. Impressed by powder snow event on a SW flow -

Geez... I thought I was just mirroring what the actual GGEM, Euro...show - Hey, if they bend toward different look ... will mention that too. I really don't give a shit either way. Snow, don't snow. Again - for the record, I like interesting meteorology, first. The only time I reeeeally kinda sort of care about the snow stuff is if I'm leveling 40" in the yard, and want to break that as a private sort of nerd existential record, which happens to be more personal snow depth record while living < 500' elevation. I've nicked 40 once, in 2015, otherwise, 36" was the previous record held twice, once in 1995 ...the other in 2010. I don't really care otherwise, ... snow is too ephemeral...and the storms missed? Meh...the cinema in the models is an endless cycle and will return, admittedly at irregular intervals, but I have other interest during down times. I speak at length about the HC stuff...not because I'm ending winter or whatever douch-clown antics that's about... That is interesting Met - see how that works? And when/if a historic bomb shows up in the future, we'll go blow the doors off the posting records in there just fine.

It's a spring look.. transposed over a feeble solar input, but it's definitely a spring like spaghetti plot pattern there (wrt to the oper. GGEM/ Euro runs) Notice the deep cold retreated clear to almost the arctic circle and above? Pretty much rendering all points south of ~ 70 N to -6 to +5 850 mb thermal layout. You can get it done blue bomb ways but you need the mechanic/dynamic forcing and that thing out there around the 25-26th ... being in the runs for days and day as it has, is very marginal and could use some of the former steroid. Otherwise, you layout that look in the latter half of Feb and we're seeing 60 surface isotherm probably central Jersey to DSM with mid 50s to BUF

Yeah I spoke about that speed issue in the other thread… Id even argue that this thing would probably find its way to 33° and turn to rain if it were a slower mover. Speed is a snow lovers ally in this case

that's a spring bowler on that GGEM ...hands down... Relaxed flow marginality amid a plate of spaghetti look ..that is vintage late March - actually not as bad with the noodles as the Euro though Oper. Euro wasn't far off...just 'that much' less sculpted/refined in design, otherwise it's the same weird bag of amorphous, ill-defined negative turner. GGEM's more robust by inches, but enough to cool the column through a blue changer-over, as well as the middling cyclonic response running up the coast. Get few knots in the vortmax and bore 6 dm out of the core, and that Euro solution does the same thing... Which, I have been watching the 25-27th for days... days. The GEFs ensembles, every single one, have some kind of EC proximate cyclogenesis going on around that time, and have for quite a while. This is a weird pattern ... there's post above about panic over whether the pattern changes... I find it laughable.. .OF course it changed! good Christ... It's almost like, if it doesn't change into what they want, cryo-dystoian bliss, it ain't changing. hahaha. Man, gotta love the reasonability of court-yard rabble.

Looking over the last 24 hours ..it occurs to me. Firstly, this cyclone's trajectory is a climate no-no for snow. The fact that it is destined to snow anyway has causality that is way > 50 % driven by anomalies, relative to climate norms. This system's 'snowier profile' is almost entirely secondarily emergent off the speed of it's translation through the flow. It's large, and it's over, in 9 hours. The column from BUFF-BOS/ White Plains, NY - PWM is so cold initially, the atmosphere simply does not have time to warm up to flip to rain, by the time the deeper QPF dynamics are gone.. In some respects, "SWFE" all have that similar genetic trait,... in that there is enough cold in the bank - so to speak - that it overruns for awhile. It's hard to separate the two. But this making that effect much more coherently clear the way in which it's synoptics are portrayed/looped .. exaggerated. Very interesting... but I suspect with the high in eastern Ontario, having corrected weaker as we've approached this event, this thing would have otherwise found its way back to 34 and light/moderate rain, if it were moving slower more akin to climate speeds. It's being faster than normal, outpaces that.

At least the HC has come down to seasonal norms in the models... In fact, it did so about a month ahead of last year...which waited until the ides of Feb to show that tendency... What's funny is that the the HC seems destined to normalize, but the R-wave is refusing to cooperate. The Euro goes right ahead and develops a new SE ridge, but ...this time you can tell it is not anchored in anywhere close to the same footing as the prior expressions of that. So, I'd rather an extended with just an R-wave structure, rather than having to deal both with the that along with the other planetary fixation. At least this version is going to be more mutable. The CPC is less encouraging looking than the CDC as far as the GEFs derivatives are moving. I dunno... to be fair... this may be a dud winter. Could be wrapped up in a couple of cold waves and the one blockbuster storm in early December, sure. Which... heh, that's actually better than some years. Who knows... Can't buy an SSW/QBO. That might help. As an after thought... it's never to early to start bowling season either.

You're actually 2 to 3 days late on this ... I spoke at length to Will back whence about the about faced betrayal of the EPS and how it flipped diametrically positive after it was solidly signaling a -EPO for days. That said, the GGEM has a -EPO ridge up there D6- 10 ... Some of the GEF members do as well... If nothing else, these products expose that there was/is something in the physics of the circulation heading through the mid range into the extended that supports an episodic EPO ridge.. It's just that for whatever physical detection, the EPS presently does not like it. That said part II, ...if the EPS can taketh away, it can addeth too. It just hasn't yet,...and perhaps it won't. In fact, it gets harder to imagine it won't the longer the present stuff persists.. Understood. But the beauty about nature and the natural order is, it'll do what it does whether one believes it or not.

You're right ... Eventually we'll average none

Yeah ditto. Not a grouse pattern at all

D3 - 6 appear below a bit at 850... otherwise about equal above is all. I dunno - ...sour grapes lends to overselling the down side of looks. Sure

It's really not a 'torch' ... not relative to normal anyway. The absence of a focused mechanism ( speaking in deference to the Euro I presume ) may be misleading for some, but there is plenty of cold air around to get things interesting should said mechanics formulate - in the form of some sort of more tranditional + PNAP pattern. You know ... western ridge eastern trough. That's a hot mess between D7 and 10. Almost looks like April but with cold 850s around.

Man...this could be so great if we could just get western N/A to cooperate... f. Talking 578 dm heights over Miami, with no flags over 30 nots IN A RIDGE there. That is how you set the table. Problem is, the heights aren't committing to a convincing +PNAP. Funny, both the GGEM and GFS are QPFing the hell outta the eastern seaboard in that time frame, nonetheless.

I wonder when the GFS expects us to purchase the 25/26th, but it's unrelenting in its marketing ploy -

Yup...so is GGEM. Actually, when I saw that, I clicked the GGEM back several panels -it's actually been trending snowier.

yup... And the national view has it's place cuz ...well, if one is a serious weather dork, it's nice to fly around lol

Ah...I bet that 'unfurls' ...it wasn't supposed to get to 7, either. Typical behavior for that guidance - Not always, no... we'll see.

Heh... I wish it were that easy.. Problem is, I'm getting increasingly more leery ( not that you are anyone cares or asked for my opinion of course... ) with comparatives between un-like eras. The climate isn't just changing...it's done/doing so logarithmically - ...the old comparing of Ali to Tyson. Can't really do it. Shouldn't that ( logically ) immediately send ripples of uncertainty when assessing anything now, based up a time(s) prior to the linear part of that change ( on...1990s)? Uncertainty that would naturally only be exacerbated by the last 20 years when the climate change appears to be a curved ascent. You may not be "relying" on '58 through '78 to formulate a speculation framework - that's not what I mean. I'm saying that - for me - I don't think the 'climate signaling' is really being read right these days...because it can't in way? I'm just i gotta say ...I'm a little flummoxed that there is evidence in the actual dailies, for the HC to relax really everywhere around the NH lower latitudes...and the MJO is robust in Phase 7/8... so, the MJO "should" be able to take advantage and show it can exert an influence more. The HC was enveloping the MJO prior... sort of in the same sense why it helped mute the mega NINO in 2015-'16... Gradient detection falters when the HC engulfs - Where the f is it? I wonder if it will all happen at once or something. I dunno.

Not a mod ...but, that's perfectly valid to to mention the data, and ask/open dialogue about the implications therein... The 15th has been updated, by the way... It too is showing a bit of an "index betrayel" - as I tongue-in-cheeked a while ago, specifically with the EPO handling. There were clues, frets and starts in the operational tenors over the last week, for blocking episodes up over Alaska... The ensemble mean you provide above from ESRL hasn't admittedly been totally on-board in the EPS channel there... but, the PNA, as is clearly shown in both the 14th and the 15th, and priors, is going thru a whopper correction event. That bottomed out some -5 SD ...and ends up all the way to +1 at ESRL... +.25 at CPC. CPC didn't bottom the PNA as deeply as this product above from CDC ...but, still going from -3 or so to +.25 is impressive enough to send pattern change signal. My own failing is that I assumed with the MJO being so demonstratively punching a powerful wave sig through late 6 on into and thru phase 7 ( and probably deeper into 8 ), probably meant that the operational blocking suggestions had more legs. They may yet prove to be so...and it could come back..and prove this neg-head model bs from last night is a red herring. That's the problem with big continuity shifts... which the EPS' version of the EPO certainly represents a significant shift, we need more than a single cycle to gain confidence... I mean, 5 days ago, the EPS mean was charging into a -1-ish EPO, so if it can reverse, it can reverse again.. etc..etc. But here's the rub on that... that's based on 1978 through circa 2004 modeling ( prior to that, it didn't really exist enough so ..). Continuity is like 101 deterministic synoptic met. If the models change a lot, forget it... If they hold a solution, that is supposed to supply confidence. What's been happening in recent years is more like what they call in NFL Football as "chunk plays"? Only using that expression here, we are showing discontinuity in chunk runs. Basically... we are going 5 ... 7 someodd cycles worth showing ..relatively similar ideas, lending to confidence, but then getting the rug pulled out from underneath. This is also happening at mid and large mass scales, too - i.e., the teleconnectors. Not just individual modeling performance. That's making correcting and on-going modulation and anticipation...all of it, a head game. Fascinating. I don't know why that is ... but I'm loaded with science fiction speculation that could certainly convey with reasonable turns of phrase.