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The Pattern Ahead

ORH_wxman

By ORH_wxman,
in New England

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ski MRG

ski MRG

Posted
Posted

Is there something in the cards? Surprise I ddidn't lose power or some of the older trees. No leaves ftw.

Nothing more than a suspicion on my part that the weather will not remain benign for any great length of time. 9* here right now, time to go up to 2k and clear the site of the 20" that fell there. Productivity killer.

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MaineJayhawk

MaineJayhawk

Posted
Posted

Little enought that the lack of snow blower wasn't too big a deal! lol

I'm guessing I wound up with about a whopping 6", though who the hell knows with all the blowing. Suffice it to say the wind was a lot more impressive up this way than the snow totals. How 'bout you?

I figured you were out all day shoveling snow. 6" is all you got? Join the club of woe. 6.3" here. :(

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Mr Torchey

Mr Torchey

Posted
Posted

Goodmorning!

Winter Postcard out there this morning....15 inches of heaven on the ground.

Slow warmup into the weekend, will feel nice to get out there and sled at night with temps not in the teens, and this snowpack is going nowhere fast, especially since there is some ip/snowalls in the mix.

Some monster snow banks around sw ct, heading out for work, stopping by some parking lots that are notorious for some monster snow mountains!!

Have a beaut.

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Damage In Tolland

Damage In Tolland

Posted
Posted

Goodmorning!

Winter Postcard out there this morning....15 inches of heaven on the ground.

Slow warmup into the weekend, will feel nice to get out there and sled at night with temps not in the teens, and this snowpack is going nowhere fast, especially since there is some ip/snowalls in the mix.

Some monster snow banks around sw ct, heading out for work, stopping by some parking lots that are notorious for some monster snow mountains!!

Have a beaut.

What are :unsure: snowalls?

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CoastalWx

CoastalWx

Posted
Posted

there seems to be some sort of signal for a snowstorm around January 4th-8th. A bit of a Archambault signal there. Thoughts?

Something seems to be brewing at that time. The thing I like is that we have a polar vortex over Hudson Bay with a -nao. That is definitely an eyebrow raiser..I bet Will is happy to see that. Pattern imo, looks pretty good after NY. Euro ensembles even have a low going overhead.

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weathafella

weathafella

Posted
Posted

Nothing excites me like a 10-11 day threat. lol

Are the flights more or less back on schedule?

Not close. I was canceled yesterday.....supposedly can't go till Friday and that's too late. You can't get through unless you stay up till 3AM. Clusterf*ck. But I did experience a storm where my area was among the SNE jackpots so its all good.

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Typhoon Tip

Typhoon Tip

Posted
Posted

Something seems to be brewing at that time. The thing I like is that we have a polar vortex over Hudson Bay with a -nao. That is definitely an eyebrow raiser..I bet Will is happy to see that. Pattern imo, looks pretty good after NY. Euro ensembles even have a low going overhead.

With all due respect ...for me, I am mystified at this -NAO obsession that more than just seems to permeate the opinions of the site contributors. We had it beaten over our heads for 6 straight weeks beginning in November and lasting throughout much of this last month as opportunities more than just a couple suppressed and or simple processed out of existence by large scale negative wave interference produced by having all that geopotential compression east of the Mississippi River. All because the -NAO back exerted too much gradient. It's really rather simple conceptually, yet people seem predisposed - for some reason I am not sure - to getting all excited by the presence of a -NAO.

This is not by any means meant to impugn you personally, Scott, but it cannot be stressed enough that -NAO's only value is to supply leading cold; but when the ducks of quacker begin to line up, it needs to get the f on out of there with speed - or at least something needs to take place on a larger scale to mitigate its effect of causing the balanced middle tropospheric wind to blow so strongly that in situ short waves lose identity arriving east of the MV. If those individual impulses are not "differentiable" with respect to the ambient geostrophic wind, no storm, and the best way to ensure that is have a -NAO bullying its exertion. If what you mean is, 'I like the generalized appeal that cold air will be around', then I absolutely concur. But people really need to get their heads wrapped around this if they wish to be good at synoptic assessments out in time.

I think the psychology of it is interesting; the popularity of the -NAO was formulated pretty well in the last 1980s and then blossomed through the 1990s - it's a sexy term: "Negative North Atlantic oscillation". Has kind of a cool outlander mysterious realm sound to it, like something out of Lord Of the Rings, easy to remember because of the grandeur of it all. It doesn't help that when one picks up a text book that outlines the -NAO, they see a neat buckled pattern with a trough near 35N, and a blocking ridge near Greenland, and a caption that reads words to the affect of: "This increases the lower atmospheric cold at middle latitudes over eastern North America and western Europe". All of which is true, however, what connotes as a stormy pattern is only true when the NAO is entering or leaving the negative phase state. We were punished for 6 weeks learning that lesson, and then the -NAO relaxed, the PNA at last rose some 2SD, BOOM: "Hysteric" blizzard.

Once the negative NAO was identified as related to events, the exact nature of "how" it is related, in science, has lacked since imho. Heather's work really handles the PNA pretty exclusively (not that anyone is confusing that here); I bring it up because the conceptual Meteorology behind her work is beautifully, elegantly simplistic, and it should apply really to all atmospheric domains.

Anyway, the bottom line on this:

-NAO = BAD

delta(-NAO) = BETTER.

That said, the -EPO/+PNA couplet is actually gorgeous for us, too. I am not sure which is better, (relaxing/altering NAO with PNA on the move), or (relaxing/altering EPO with PNA on the move). Probably about even money on either combination producing an elevated risk for cyclogenesis.

Currently the NAO is negative according to the CPC. Unfortunately, it appears the CDC office has not calculated their values since the 21-23 of December. Having to rely exclusively on CPC's for the time being ... the PNA is forecast to remain nearly neutral for the next 6 or so days, then attempt a spike around the end of the first week of January. I think it interesting that you guys are sniffing something out around that time when we see that graphically there is a pretty well clustered opinion with the 21 member GFS family of ensembles for perhaps something interesting around that time. The upshot is that the NAO is rising then.

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Typhoon Tip

Typhoon Tip

Posted
Posted

John, it has been shown numerous times that climatologically, a winter that on the whole that has a negative NAO is better than one with a positive one. A -NAO is not bad...

That's true, but why: One has to look at each individual event in those 'winters as a whole', and analyze what the behavior of the NAO teleconnector was prior to, during, and after.

The point of the discussion is that -NAO as a blanket good thing is risky and not really true when one does that analysis - which I have - because they will find that the NAO is on the move the vast majority of times, and a stagnantly negative one is not correlated very well with presence on the weather map of a big, or big-like system.

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Baroclinic Zone

Baroclinic Zone

Posted
Posted

John, it has been shown numerous times that climatologically, a winter that on the whole that has a negative NAO is better than one with a positive one. A -NAO is not bad...

I see the point John is making. Nobody wants to have a -4SD -NAO for the whole winter. You want it to fluctuate as John stipulates and we all agree on that.. We are just generalizing that we want a -NAO on the whole, which is true as well.

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codfishsnowman

codfishsnowman

Posted
Posted

Is it just me or does anyone else think something is major wrong at BDL...they had fourteen inches of snow and just about everyone else around them had less than ten inches????

How do they get away with that and this is not the first time this has happened?? I think they over report totals to the point it skews the annual average!

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CoastalWx

CoastalWx

Posted
Posted

I'm also not hoping for a rising and falling NAO to get big events. I'm happy with any redeveloping NJ or Delmarva low, or swfe type deal. In general, having a -nao to keep the cold around and lows going south of us, is all I care about. Obviously a -4 to -5SD -nao can be a little much..there can be too much of a good thing, but in general I don't think anyone will disagree that ridging over Greenland puts a smile on their face.

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OSUmetstud

OSUmetstud

Posted
Posted

I see the point John is making. Nobody wants to have a -4SD -NAO for the whole winter. You want it to fluctuate as John stipulates and we all agree on that.. We are just generalizing that we want a -NAO on the whole, which is true as well.

yeah of course...I think due to last winter...people are a little -NAO afraid. Not every -NAO features some kind of crushing Nova Scotia closed low.

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OSUmetstud

OSUmetstud

Posted
Posted

I'm also not hoping for a rising and falling NAO to get big events. I'm happy with any redeveloping NJ or Delmarva low, or swfe type deal. In general, having a -nao to keep the cold around and lows going south of us, is all I care about. Obviously a -4 to -5SD -nao can be a little much..there can be too much of a good thing, but in general I don't think anyone will disagree that ridging over Greenland puts a smile on their face.

that's even more true this winter...we have a non-conducive Pacific this winter...and without the -NAO/-AO in place...we'd be flooded with Pacific air.

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OSUmetstud

OSUmetstud

Posted
Posted

That's true, but why: One has to look at each individual event in those 'winters as a whole', and analyze what the behavior of the NAO teleconnector was prior to, during, and after.

The point of the discussion is that -NAO as a blanket good thing is risky and not really true when one does that analysis - which I have - because they will find that the NAO is on the move the vast majority of times, and a stagnantly negative one is not correlated very well with presence on the weather map of a big, or big-like system.

It can be risky I suppose...but especially with the Pacific pattern in place this year...we need the -NAO to be persistent. You don't need a significant PNA/NAO modulation to get moderate snows...which are really what people should be looking for as we go into the winter with a moderate/strong La Nina.

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CoastalWx

CoastalWx

Posted
Posted

that's even more true this winter...we have a non-conducive Pacific this winter...and without the -NAO/-AO in place...we'd be flooded with Pacific air.

Yeah agreed. That's why I think many of us were looking for that. That's going to help fight any tendency for pumped up east coast ridging. None of us can resolve the details, but all we can do is look for the big pieces of the puzzle, and hope everything falls in place.

BTW, perhaps another busy 'cane season next year??

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OSUmetstud

OSUmetstud

Posted
Posted

Yeah agreed. That's why I think many of us were looking for that. That's going to help fight any tendency for pumped up east coast ridging. None of us can resolve the details, but all we can do is look for the big pieces of the puzzle, and hope everything falls in place.

BTW, perhaps another busy 'cane season next year??

I'm not sure about the hurricane season....solar minimum...and I found no correlation with the preceding ENSO state. The season can turn to **** in a hurry if we get El Nino developing during the Fall. If it stays Neutral...we'll be good. I don't think the numbers will be quite as good as last year since we don't have the El Nino and -AO working in concert to provide crazy warm Spring SSTs along with a develop Nina causing very low shear. We need a switch to a positive NAO/AO during the summer to get a nice East Coast landfall.

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