olafminesaw

Pretty much in line with what everyone else was saying:

The only interesting weather in the CONUS upcoming is the potent front in about 5 days. The GFS has about 500 miles to go from single digits in Wyoming to near 80 degrees in central Kansas. Of course it will not deliver meaningful arctic air to this side of the country. Because why would it?

Looking at Greensboro obs on weatherspark there was two freezing rain events in December, one freezing rain even in January one light snow ob in January, and a light snow ob and mixed bag event in February. Obviously none of the snow or sleet actually accumulated. But two instances of mood flakes that year

Some signs of a few non-accumulating pity flakes Saturday evening from the ULL. The really shocking thing is we haven't even had more than 30 minutes of frozen precip of any kind during the snow drought. I'm sure the same can't be said of the 90s drought.

You'll be back on March 12th, when the Pacific finally relaxes and we're on our way to 33 and rain. Just you wait!

Sigh...

Eh, the mean is a near perfect track and still, the probabilities aren't great. The overall setup is still rather poor. Still, we might luck into something

May happy hour be happy for once. Hard to stomach the big three indicies being favorable, including a 3 std dev negative AO resulting in the same old la Nina pattern. But I prefer to focus on the fact that we have a storm to track that isn't dead yet.

Average out the 12z and 18z and you get great storm for many. Good run considering suppression from the EPS

Also of note, the models are trending towards a quick reload after the system to not really deviate from a favorable pattern. Of course we will be fighting an uphill battle with climo at that stage but it's also not necessarily do or die for the PD storm

The GFS looks much more like the EPS than the Euro OP. Sustained source of cold air aloft and multiple opportunities for wave development in the WAA region. Sometimes moisture can over perform in these setups far away from any kind of low pressure development. Knoxville scored big from WAA moisture last month even though they were thought to be on the dry side of the storm. Ideally we need to have the northern stream energy not interfere too much for this to work.

To me GFS looks much better through 168. Better stream interaction.

Last night's EPS had like 3-4 waves it's trying to resolve. Kinda a good thing because with a big amped up storm we always flip to rain/ice. Moisture riding the boundary is our path to a big storm as yesterday's 12z GFS depicted. Having to rely on a well timed phase does make me nervous, but that's just winter in the South

Interesting how the ensembles have consistently much more suppressed than the OP. Thankfully the Euro is nearly in range and can hopefully give us a somewhat clearer picture.

Yeah not really a great place that's free. Weather.us has limited individual member maps as well as plume graphs for a specified location.

College of dupage doesn't have all the members. I think it's just one member skewing the mean. There's one that drops 2 feet of snow on Montgomery Alabama.

The major theme from the ensembles is suppression for the storm around the 19th. Seems to be plenty of cold air though, which would yield a very good result with a few ticks more amped, as the GFS lends credence to. Now is the time for patience, can't control what happens.

Does anyone have upper level data for February 2015? This was an El Nino year which could be a good analog for what a good outcome might look like.Started out warm and ended very cold. One big storm for the northern half of NC and a couple smaller storms.

It does look pretty good in theory. Ensembles leave on the table the general evolution we've faced. Cutter on the front side, cold air gets established but too dry and HP keeps waves from developing in the Gulf, pattern relaxes and the firehose starts back up but there isn't any blocking high to lock cold in place. Still, overall the best window we've seen all winter with cold and moisture linking up on at least some guidance.

Sometimes I feel like long range tracking is a bit like surfing. You're waiting for that perfect wave to come along, big enough, breaks at the right angle and where you're at. Sometimes you look off in the distance and see what looks like the perfect wave. It's all coming together. But at the last minute you realize it's just a swell that doesn't really break, or it peters out. Some days you're out there and wave after wave just doesn't break the way you need it too. You think you're unlucky at first, but after a while you realize, without a shift of the wind, or moving to a different location, all the waves are going to break that way. We need that proverbial wind shift and if it never comes, we all need to move to buffalo.

The GEFS members that have snow transfer and develope a new low near the coast which gets pulled inland by the interaction with the original low. A messy setup that could work in theory, but can't think of an analog where this worked out. The OP kinda has this evolution, it's just that the system gets pulled OTS to quickly, which would be the more plausible solution.

Pretty much in line with what I would expect with this system. A long shot but realistically possible

The biggest reason to be pessimistic is lack of cold air. Even with a perfect track we would likely be all cold rain. The only path to snow at this point is for the storm to stall just off shore and wrap cold air around. A tall order for sure.

Doesn't raising the resolution just make it exactly the same as the current OP? Because the control is just a low resolution version of the OP currently?

The southern stream energy comes ashore Thursday evening so the weenie playbook says we can't write this one off until then.