Cold Rain

The MJO is forecast to get into the cold phases, but the models seem to keep a SE ridge. Either they are wrong, or the MJO has become irrelevant.

Solar stuff: sunspot activity, solar winds, geomagnetic storms, coronal holes, etc. We’re going into a deep and extended solar minimum. Some theorize that it will lead to a cooler climate and harsher winters. Less sunspots and a cooler surface of the sun lead to more coronal holes which produce more cosmic rays. Still sort of a pick-‘em as to which side of the debate to believe, though personally, I lean toward the fact that it does/will play a significant role in our weather, particularly given the degree of this minimum.

Ryan layeth the smacketh down!

Don’t get me wrong, I love me some OFA. We would have done well to heed their temp forecast around these parts.

Hahaha an area of mild and snowy surrounded in all sides by warm and wet or warm and dry. Lol

They definitely did better with respect to temps in the SE, but that map is stupid. It is an abomination to forecast maps!!

Yep, it was rolling our way there for a little while, and then it started hauling a$$ over to Siberia. Definitely going to go down as the worst winter ever in my book, unless we get one of those Marches of yore to show up. Most certainly, the expectations for this winter make it all the worse.

Yeah. They were wrong. I hope they’re wrong with the duration of this one because if not, we’re done.

Until the trough out west goes away, you can forget it around here. It just keeps reloading and reloading and reloading. Wonder why it never does that in the east?

I honestly don’t know if we should really expect a model to nail a winter storm from 6+ days out, given the technology we have today. I think a general pattern, maybe. But winter storms are so fickle around here, that it seems a little outlandish to expect we’re anywhere close to being able to get that kind of detail nailed down that far out. With the FV3, I’m interested to see if it gets the general H5 look 5-10 days out better than the current GFS and to see what kind of biases it has, if any. So far, my understanding is that its scores are not all that great and that it has a cold bias and a bias of overdoing the strength of highs at longer leads.

Thinking the FV3 is overdoing the high strength and the duration of it. If it ends up weaker, like I suspect it will, then it needs to end up being quite a bit farther south, which I don't think is possible given the pattern.

I agree with this mostly, with the caveat that I’d argue that you actually have better than coin flip odds if you go with persistence and go warm. For whatever reason, warm wins now. Something is going on that essentially renders analogs of yesteryear useless.

He’s right. Our early spring started in January. Winter is about to cycle back around again in mid Feb!

Yeah, the December storm was pretty stready from 7-8 days out. Quite the exception.

That seems chilly.

Here's one more index update for the week!

Would love to see that Atlantic ridge get displaced for a time. That would really help.

Once blocking returns, we'll be good. We've generally had an extremely poor run in that department. Not surprising that snow and winter storms are down. Now, why is blocking in winter so uncommon? Not sure.

1/29 Index Update:

Is this like 4 Ninas in a row then?

Looks like a quick reload. 6z FV3 setting up cold again at the end.

May get enough dynamic cooling. I hate relying on that. But we haven’t really had many opportunities this winter. This one will be close. I’m normally a cold first guy, but since we have to work with what we got, I’m all for getting the precip in here and rolling the dice. Boundary temps look ugly, though...no arguing that.

50-100 miles NW over two days. When does that not happen? Lol. If I was in downeast, Shaggy, and weatherNc country, I’d be super excited! Maybe even eastern Wake could end up picking up a sprinkle.

Falling snow is the only thing that impacts snow shield strength, unfortunately. Also unfortunately, the 0z Nam did us no favors. You usually get one Nam run that sucks you in with heavy qpf or favorable trends. The 18z was probably it. But then again, maybe the 6z bounces backs. We’ll see.

Sunday night/Monday-ish.