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The March 5-7 White Lion Obs/Nowcasting Thread


Ji

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it's march this stuff is going to melt in 45 seconds tomorrow

Actually, that's one thing this has going for it. If I had 4" of normal snow or fluff, it would have been obliterated by the rain and rising temps this afternoon. Instead, we have super ratio snow that fell at 6:1 and then sucked in all of the rest of the precip that fell later. Now it is just condensed paste that may hang on for a few extra hours.

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it was an across the board bust.. but some of your comments are out of context of course. for the record i didn't think it was producing feb 2010 totals. the pattern was similar.

 

i dunno what happened last night.. cascade effect. i swear everyone got each other into super weenie mode and it ran through multiple spheres.

 

Yes we entered a weenie trans like state.  And yes that 925MB map showing the colder than forecasted temps I'm guessing was the problem. I'm guessing a bad init on models had the airmass off the Jersey shore way to cold, I still am struggling to get below 37F at 9pm.

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Don't beat yourself up you did just as good as any other met in the world with this, except that 15 year old wiz kid. Just remember your usual strategy of being pessimistic works here 95% of the time.

I'm sure it will be a long time before I'm optimistic again

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I'm sure it will be a long time before I'm optimistic again

We were probably too "believing" for a couple of reasons. One, it's March. Two, we had no sign of a cold air mass. Three, regardless of what some say, we had too much sun and warmth yesterday. That heat has to go somewhere.

This setup from Dec 15-Feb 15 would have produced a snow storm 10 out of 10 times.

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Did I really just read 2 complaints about getting 10+. Anyone see the movie falling down? I might re-enact tomorrow.

 

Meh, I'd be bummed too if I'd slept through the vast majority of it.

 

EDIT: apparently WinterwxLuvr was up since 4am. In that case he's got no room to complain. I'm jealous as fook of all the awesome pics he's got.

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Did I really just read 2 complaints about getting 10+. Anyone see the movie falling down? I might re-enact tomorrow.

It ain't what it's cracked up to be, Bob. If you like a totally sloppy mess everywhere, you'd be thrilled. Spring snow is only fun while it's snowing. It sucks as soon as it stops. And if you didn't even see 80% of it fall and it cost you an hour or two of work just to be able to leave the house, it sucks even worse.

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Meh, I'd be bummed too if I'd slept through the vast majority of it.

EDIT: apparently WinterwxLuvr was up since 4am. In that case he's got no room to complain. I'm jealous as fook of all the awesome pics he's got.

I tried to get up at 4 and watch it snow. I snapped a pic , sat in a chair at the breakfast table and tried to watch it snow. That lasted about 10 minutes. Watching snow by the deck light isn't that special, and I just went back to sleep.

Edit: 24 hours from now, I'll have the same amount of snow as everyone else.

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Serious question: Will anyone actually examine why the NAM was so off here? I mean, last night we were all high-fiving how "the NAM had scored a coup, the NAM was back, the NAM led the way."..... Err,... It was a pretty big fail, even for a model that at one point suggest 70 inches of snow would fall in part of New England in the Boston Blizzard 4 weeks ago.

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This storm didn't even feel like March snow, it felt more like April, or at least late March post-equinox. I think the reason was the lack of cold air supply which should've been better even in early March. I've heard of these April storms with lots of accumulation, but also a lot of switching between rain and snow at 34-35. Not to mention the sloppy cement it was when I tried shoveling the drenched 3".

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This storm didn't even feel like March snow, it felt more like April, or at least late March post-equinox. I think the reason was the lack of cold air supply which should've been better even in early March. I've heard of these April storms with lots of accumulation, but also a lot of switching between rain and snow at 34-35. Not to mention the sloppy cement it was when I tried shoveling the drenched 3".

 

march is april now. just wait till feb is june.

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I appreciate it but apparently it's mostly for entertainment purposes only. It's been a whole lotta typing and no shoveling.

Perhaps Next winter will be awesome...I look forward to future analysis and lots of shoveling (for my son).

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Normally the weather Gods don't usually inflict more than three horrific winters in a row. So that's 11/12, 12/13...shoot! Well I'll toss in 10/11, which sucked except for the January event, and even that wasn't terribly impressive in the city proper. Next winter shall be very good one then

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Normally the weather Gods don't usually inflict more than three horrific winters in a row. So that's 11/12, 12/13...shoot! Well I'll toss in 10/11, which sucked except for the January event, and even that wasn't terribly impressive in the city proper. Next winter shall be very good one then

I hate to say it, but we have time. ~7 year cycles is the new norm around here. 1996, 2003, 2010. 2017 is going to be rocking.

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Justin Berk has given himself a C as a forecast grade. He gave himself a B for the suburbs of Baltimore where he predicted 6-10 inches of snow. Anyone have that?

Everyone likes to spin but coming out and saying you were too deterministic in a tricky situation and made a mistake is fine. A few people will b tricked into thinking your forecast verified if it did in their backyard but over time the game gets figured out. He is known pretty far and wide for being a snow weenie to the 100th degree.

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It ain't what it's cracked up to be, Bob. If you like a totally sloppy mess everywhere, you'd be thrilled. Spring snow is only fun while it's snowing. It sucks as soon as it stops. And if you didn't even see 80% of it fall and it cost you an hour or two of work just to be able to leave the house, it sucks even worse.

I need to come up there and shovel your entire town. I have at least seven Jebman shovels. No more slop.

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I was led astray by the psuhoffman storm. That was another marginal event where I scored bigtime -- 14 inches. I even made it through the lull with sleet and no rain. Were the temps very different in this one?

 

temps were crashing during the day during that one, and may have even got to freezing.  in this storm, i don't think they even dropped to feezing last night, at least in my neck of the woods and actually rose during the day today.  i also don't think it was 100% snow last night.

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I guess everybody has a letdown feeling with this storm. Somebody will say how can you be let down with an 11.5 inch snow? Well, it goes to two things which for me ended up being the same thing. What I was hoping for was an all day mod-heavy snow. I never wanted 20 inches or even a foot. I was hoping for about 6" that fell over about an 8 hour period. Then I hoped it melted the next day. I like to watch it snow. Well what I got was 9" by 7am (over performer btw) and then 2.5 more by about 9:30. So, I got to see snow for a couple daylight hours, and spend about an hour and a half plowing the driveway and shoveling the walks and deck.

The early part of the storm was great. Forecast of 3-5 turned into 9. The part I wanted, the all day long, was what fell apart. I knew as soon as the precip took on the ne-sw direction back here that it was over. We were too far from the low at that point. We only do really well back here with precip coming from the south, be it sw, se, or just s. Precip with a northerly component to its direction just won't work this far west and this close to the mountains. Feb 10, 10 is a perfect example of that. It's like the low wound itself up too quickly for the long duration event back this way.

Now I hope winter is over. It was a tough year, much tougher for some than for me. We can all look ahead to next year with hope. One fun part for me has been hanging around this forum and being able to share thoughts with so many outstanding people.

 

Coming from someone in the SE, I'm not sure if you're mentally deficient or just worse than Brick.  I'll go with the first.  Congrats!  You have successfully made your run for WOTY on various other sites, including Twitter.

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Those forecasts were plain wrong. “This was the biggest bust in the history of http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang'>the Capital Weather Gang,” said The Washington Post’s chief meteorologist, Jason Samenow. He said the major mistake was to accept computer models that said the amount of moisture in the storm would make up for the warmth of the air below.

Much of that article (where the above quote is from) is painful to read. A few gems...

"But Bowers, who has worked for the system for three decades, said he might have reached a different conclusion years ago. In the 1980s, Montgomery never shut down, he said. Bowers remembers a convoy of plow trucks heading up Interstate 270 to clear a path for buses to pick up sixth-graders who had been stranded at an outdoor education camp for a week.

“We’ve gotten wimpier,” he said."

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Ah, yes, the ole "back in my day, we'd walk to school in blizzard conditions with temperatures below zero and with no coat, hat, gloves, or shoes! " leaving aside the fact that I'm not even sure about the validity of his statement, does he not remember the traffic disaster that was Jan 26, 2011?

The next gem:

"“We made our decisions based on, unfortunately, faulty weather predictions,” said Pedro Ribeiro, spokesman for D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D). “You can’t really blame the government officials for using the data the scientists gave them.”

Ribiero said media forecasts “did tend to hype it up a little bit, but what we look at is the data. We have to take that as valid.”"

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There certainly appears to be some blame going on here because the "scientists were wrong!!!" Can't blame us, blame the "faulty weather predictions" made by the scientists!

Another....

"As ever, the same decisions that drive some people to distraction seem perfectly sane to others. Adam Eidinger, a publicist in the District and father of a third-grader, skipped work to stay home with his daughter and said closing schools was “a complete overreaction to the weather that’s actually been encouraged by a culture of laziness. . . . Working families are terribly burdened by this. So why does the government feel like it can just shut down?”

Eidinger suggested a simple rule: Close only if there are at least three inches of snow."

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Is this guy serious? Yeah, closing schools and the federal government based on a forecast of 6-10" is all about laziness! Why does the government feel like they can do whatever they want, such as close due to a snowstorm, in order to protect their employees and look out for their safety? What gives them the right to make sure that we don't get hurt trying to come in to work during a major storm? Pure laziness, that's all! (Please note the sarcasm :) )

Also, that's a nice simple rule...but the forecast WAS for more than 3". Is he suggesting that we should have sent kids to school and employees to work only to bring them back in the middle of a storm once his arbitrary 3" mark was reached? Solid plan!

There is more, but I think I'll stop there. The stupidity and blatant ignorance of the general public when it comes to anything weather related always boggles my mind. Yeah, I'm biased because I'm a weather weenie/nerd/whatever, but even if I were not, I would like to think I'd be reasonable enough not to make some of the stupid comments people, like those quoted above, have made. Not to forget all the "well, the weathermen were wrong again! The only profession where you get paid to be wrong more than half the time!" lines that people who have absolutely zero knowledge about the weather like to throw out as they pat themselves on the back for what the think was an awesome joke.

Anyway, sorry for the rant, I was a bit mean ( :( ), and maybe this belongs in the banter thread, so please move if needed ;) Here is the link to the full article for those interested:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/snowquester-bust-decision-to-close-schools-and-offices-made-before-flakes-fell/2013/03/06/9a58b8ee-8687-11e2-999e-5f8e0410cb9d_story_2.html

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