radarman

Feb 2010 references might summon Logan from the NY wilderness. He got like 40"+

3/7/18 was a bit of a disappointment in the valley, with only like 6-8" on a forecast of nearly double that. Same as Boston proper. But the Berks and S Greens got destroyed.

Cool. Scotch Mist is now called Black Diamond. Makes you wonder why they changed it. Kind of like they changed my town name from the perfectly nice Cold Spring to, well... nvm. I presume the twisty diamond you mention is Lower FIS, and that's also just a wonderful long pleasant mogul run. The short hike out at the bottom tends to keep the crowds away so you can save it for later and still find fresh tracks late morning.

You can't really go wrong over there either. Rumble woods accessed from the top of Middle Earth is absolute prototype steep eastern trees and small cliffs, and even the trail itself premier Vermont cut narrow moguls down the fall line. Ellen summit is a little more exposed with scrubbier trees as you pointed out. So if it's foggy or especially windy you're better off elsewhere. Also, sometimes after a big storm, they might hold off on opening Ellen an extra day. But if you hit it right, especially on a bluebird, I don't think you'll wish you had splurged on the LP ticket.

yeah and tack on a 3 hr drive on either end. But once home and showered, you feel amazing.

The woods skiers left of Black diamond holds literally like 1-2 lines, but it's frickin chest deep in there... And the other side ain't bad either Nothing whatsoever against LP, but I have a special fondness for the Ellen summit. I think it's overlooked sometimes.

As for on the actual trail, 12/1/18 was the best I've ever seen it. 90" in November and very little wind... a pure west coast style powder puff. Skinner's reward.

Sparse trees on either side of Upper FIS are usually good to great. Not many turns in there, but they hold it. Cut over through the woods from the top of black diamond and it opens up.

I mean, I think this says it all about reporting nuances. Close to zero percent chance Mt Snow gets less than Ascutney. I'm always fine with throwing caution flags when it comes to personal anecdotes, but I feel pretty good about anecdotally coming to that conclusion.

Well, even here we get a pretty substantial percentage of our snow nickel and diming from northern stream shortwaves and on the front side of cutters/SWFEs... ie. not pure coastals. I'd be inclined to suppose that Killington incrementally scores with the CAD events based on latitude, but we know also that the west side of the mountains are prone to torching and they're tickling that edge pretty good, whereas Mt Snow has some buffer. At any rate, I don't entirely mean big nor'easter type events, which as you say likely don't contribute hugely on a percentage basis, but also your standard fare March clipper that blows up under LI, quick hitter anafrontal waves, waves on cold fronts hung up offshore, etc. Basically everything synoptic with the Atlantic as the primary moisture source.

Nice post as usual. If some objective truth were available I'd be shocked if KMart gets 100 more inches than Mt Snow. I mean when folks talk about Killington posting 8" with bare grass showing, that's a non-negligible amount of inflation. Or maybe as you said the southern areas just don't care as much or aren't clearing their boards every hour. Over the course of a few seasons I'd be interested to identify all these events where Killington is cleaning up and Mt Snow isn't, to the tune of 90 something inches annually, which is the difference basically between MBY and YBY.

Again, we have plenty of experts on this here, and you may well be one of them... so take with a grain of salt... but I've always felt that where Jay cleans up is on the lingering N/NE flow from bombing coastals in N Brunswick, etc., throwing back moisture across SE QC and the extended St Lawrence valley and they being the first beneficiary of orography. Whereas the more typical W/NW flow is fairly evenly distributed, perhaps with Mansfield even outdoing them. And SB/MRG can occasionally score big on streamers especially, but for most upslope events they certainly average less than those others further north. Even if I grant that Killington may do better than further S on westerly flow just purely based on relief, I've always kind of considered them between typical storm track paradigms, whereby they're a little too far removed from clippers and coastals that get the Berks and S Greens, and don't benefit from the seemingly daily snows that the big boys get. With temps closer to the former and moisture closer to the latter.

Sugarbush confirmed opening on the 10th today

Mostly agree but that last part I'm actually not totally sure about... Mt Snow often does better than KMart on coastals, and it's pretty rare that the R/S line hangs up between them. And for orographic snows I'm not sure the S Greens are notably different on average than Killington (are the C Greens a thing?). The height of the mountain helps a bit, but the relative narrowness of the spine there may hurt some. You are certainly the expert on upslope and I will defer.

+1 to Will for that post about 08 yesterday

you'd think I'd have caught that by the fact he called it "weather station"... been that kind of day

As long as your signal is not attenuated to extinction, the velocities are unaffected because those are derived from the phase not the power.

s band radome attenuation shouldn't be more than about 1dB and it did seem excessive... But yeah I don't have a better explanation and I don't believe the atmosphere just sh*t out that quickly

Another thing that made it very obvious was that the various color contours in the imagery all collapsed inward simultaneously the same (similar) distances, indicative of a fixed power loss offset in the entire sector.

nice catch. As someone working with X band that kind of thing happens all the time and it certainly had a familiar look to it. But one thing I noticed was that the returned power from the cell out on the ocean didn't appear to be changing very much... Could the wind be squeegee-ing away water on the east side, creating some kind of differential radome attenuation? That'd be interesting.

WaWa opening tomorrow

That's kind of like when the 12th pick of the NBA draft is taken and the announcers describe him as similar to Kobe with a little Jordan

FWIW I'm squarely under that dark band just west of the Quabbin and it's all rain at present, and not particularly heavy.

Summit cam shows like C-1"

No doubt... We were looking decent in the lead up this far east, but just totally choking on ORH's fumes right now.