Winter 2016/2017 because its never too early

[TauntonBlizzard2013]

4 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Once you got to about KGHG-KTAN and points NW it was good. Very sharp gradient. It wasn't a terrible winter on the Cape, but compared to 15 miles NW...I would have felt screwed over.

Yeah... the gradient was pretty sharp.... we did have some clunker storms though.... didn't escape mid or junk in every storm.

Id sign up for that again in a heartbeat though 

[40/70 Benchmark]

35 minutes ago, Ginx snewx said:

Congrats

That was one of those winters in which you could see the truncation coming a mile away...just like 2015...of course, the usual suspects tried to make crap into cake as down the stretch through March, but the ending sucked.

Great seasons, nonetheless.

[CoastalWx]

It would be nice to have a good 4 month season. Have a November event and then just steadily roll through late March. I guess '12-'13 did that for the interior though. 

 

As bad as last year was, it was the best April since 1997. At least snow wise.

[powderfreak]

19 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

It would be nice to have a good 4 month season. Have a November event and then just steadily roll through late March. I guess '12-'13 did that for the interior though. 

 

As bad as last year was, it was the best April since 1997. At least snow wise.

2010-2011 did that.  Still a favorite winter of mine for its duration.

Amazingly consistent up here.  Of course JSpin beat me (this is his data) with ~200" vs ~160" but monthly snow was very even.  

[Eduardo]

53 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

You got relatively boned in that winter.

Lived in DC that winter where we were shafted over and over, but was a big Miller B winter, if memory serves?

[USCAPEWEATHERAF]

Oh Scott, I remember the Dec 20th 2010 Snowstorm, that is all I got for 2010-2011 winter, I wasn't here after Jan 10th

[CoastalWx]

11 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

2010-2011 did that.  Still a favorite winter of mine for its duration.

Amazingly consistent up here.  Of course JSpin beat me (this is his data) with ~200" vs ~160" but monthly snow was very even.  

Yeah you guys rocked it. It was great here snow wise, but compressed. 

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

Looking at past snow maps from different sources which hardly match and im curious.....why can't radar be used for total snowfall like it does for rain? Couldn't there be an algorythm that takes into account the current conditions overhead to form a relatively accurate weenie ratio which is then run in real time with radar dbz? There would obviously be a margin of error relative to the total amount falling. But at least we wouldnt have to fill in the blanks of areas in between reporting stations by smoothing it out with a virtual paintbrush or creating fugazzi jacks from inaccurate reports.

just wondering....

[ORH_wxman]

11 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

It would be nice to have a good 4 month season. Have a November event and then just steadily roll through late March. I guess '12-'13 did that for the interior though. 

 

As bad as last year was, it was the best April since 1997. At least snow wise.

 

Jan '13 was kind of crappy. But Nov '12, Dec '12, and Feb/Mar '13 were very good.

 

It's pretty much impossible to get wire to wire awesome winter....at least in the context that many here want it to be. Even our great years that started early and kept going late had some deplorable stretches...'95-'96 is tainted by two bad torches...one of them lasting basically 18 days (the mid/late Feb '96 torch often gets lost in the talk due to that Jan disaster)...a year like '93-'94 was basically an 8 week winter for the coastline (a great 8 weeks it was though). A year like '68-'69 had an awful January. '70-'71 had some bummer stretches even though it was largely cold/snowy.

[CoastalWx]

13 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

 

Jan '13 was kind of crappy. But Nov '12, Dec '12, and Feb/Mar '13 were very good.

 

It's pretty much impossible to get wire to wire awesome winter....at least in the context that many here want it to be. Even our great years that started early and kept going late had some deplorable stretches...'95-'96 is tainted by two bad torches...one of them lasting basically 18 days (the mid/late Feb '96 torch often gets lost in the talk due to that Jan disaster)...a year like '93-'94 was basically an 8 week winter for the coastline (a great 8 weeks it was though). A year like '68-'69 had an awful January. '70-'71 had some bummer stretches even though it was largely cold/snowy.

I'm not even suggesting wire to wire. Just a 4 month season or so, that has some threats.  Even if there are lousy stretches....it makes the time go by for the season many look forward to.  I still think 02-03 is an underrated season by some.

[snowman19]

1 minute ago, CoastalWx said:

I'm not even suggesting wire to wire. Just a 4 month season or so, that has some threats.  Even if there are lousy stretches....it makes the time go by for the season many look forward to.  I still think 02-03 is an underrated season by some.

If you think about it, 2002-2003 really started the streak of above normal snow winters, at least for the NYC area. I guess you can argue 2000-2001 wasn't half bad either but really as a general rule since the early 2000's winters have been majority colder and definitely snowier than normal at least when compared to the 1980-2000 time frame

[ORH_wxman]

2 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

I'm not even suggesting wire to wire. Just a 4 month season or so, that has some threats.  Even if there are lousy stretches....it makes the time go by for the season many look forward to.  I still think 02-03 is an underrated season by some.

'02-03 is like the 5th coldest winter at Logan airport. A lot of people probably didn't know it was that cold. Obviously snowy too though most of it was in a 4 week period there. Over the interior we got hit all winter. 

2000-2001 was pretty consistently great over the interior. There's a decent number of winters like that but I feel like many a weenie would have a serious problem with parts of those winters....because they all want Rangeley, ME for 4 months or the picnic tables for 4 months. 

 

[heavy_wx]

11 minutes ago, RUNNAWAYICEBERG said:

Looking at past snow maps from different sources which hardly match and im curious.....why can't radar be used for total snowfall like it does for rain? Couldn't there be an algorythm that takes into account the current conditions overhead to form a relatively accurate weenie ratio which is then run in real time with radar dbz? There would obviously be a margin of error relative to the total amount falling. But at least we wouldnt have to fill in the blanks of areas in between reporting stations by smoothing it out with a virtual paintbrush or creating fugazzi jacks from inaccurate reports.

just wondering....

To start, rain estimates from radar have uncertainties themselves, especially if you only use reflectivity. Setting the single parameter issue aside for the moment, a radar beam will sample above the lowest levels of the atmosphere; the lowest height a radar beam can sample increases with range due to the geometry of the radar with respect to the Earth's surface. This is important because rainfall is measured at the surface things like raindrop break-up, collection, and advection in the lowest levels of the atmosphere can lead to estimates of rainfall at the height of the radar beam that are not representative of the surface.

Rainfall estimation with a single parameter (usually reflectivity) has large errors because of uncertainties in the number of big vs. smaller raindrops (i.e., the drop size distribution). This uncertainty also impacts what you can estimate for the fall speed of the raindrops, and therefore the amount of liquid water accumulating at a given time. Most of the legacy schemes use a number of different Z-R (reflectivity rain rate) relationships that change depending on what environmental conditions are present. Basically, they have Z-R relationships for tropical rain that are different from summertime convective rain. Dual-pol reduces the drop size distribution (DSD) uncertainty because now multiple parameters (i.e., ZDR and reflectivity or KDP and reflectivity) provide independent information about the size and shape of the raindrops. Since raindrop shape depends on the size, the dual-pol variables give us more information about the DSD.

Getting back to snow, we still have all of the uncertainties I mentioned above, but there are a few more that make estimating snowfall very difficult. To get a snowfall rate, we basically need information about the mass of snow at some location and how fast it falls. The problem (or what makes it interesting, depending on your perspective) with snow is that there is a huge variation in the size and shape of ice particles. Small junky crystals scatter (respond to radar waves) very differently than large fluffy aggregates, or large wet aggregates, or beautiful stellar crystals/plates/dendrites/columns. Because they scatter differently, different combinations of each particle type can produce the same reflectivity, and potentially the same ZDR or KDP as well. Therefore, the radar signatures start to become ambiguous, even with dual-pol.

The other problem with snow and ice is that we don't have good observations or theoretical models of how fast different ice particles fall. We can't even estimate the particle fall speeds only with radar because, as I mentioned earlier, the radar signatures give ambiguous size and shape information, and we need this information to make a guess for the average fall speed of the sampled snow and ice particles. That makes estimating the snowfall rate difficult.

Now, you may actually be able to do something similar to the multiple Z-R relationships if you had a number of different Z-S relationships, depending on climatological radar and snow measurements, created by binning those measurements by environmental/storm conditions. On the other hand, snowfall measurements are inherently uncertain themselves...

[J Paul Gordon]

Yup would take 10-11 again 90"+ here and decent cold, too.

[Damage In Tolland]

2 hours ago, CoastalWx said:

It would be nice to have a good 4 month season. Have a November event and then just steadily roll through late March. I guess '12-'13 did that for the interior though. 

 

As bad as last year was, it was the best April since 1997. At least snow wise.

You just want a season to perform as a season. No harm in that . They happen

[CoastalWx]

45 minutes ago, heavy_wx said:

To start, rain estimates from radar have uncertainties themselves, especially if you only use reflectivity. Setting the single parameter issue aside for the moment, a radar beam will sample above the lowest levels of the atmosphere; the lowest height a radar beam can sample increases with range due to the geometry of the radar with respect to the Earth's surface. This is important because rainfall is measured at the surface things like raindrop break-up, collection, and advection in the lowest levels of the atmosphere can lead to estimates of rainfall at the height of the radar beam that are not representative of the surface.

Rainfall estimation with a single parameter (usually reflectivity) has large errors because of uncertainties in the number of big vs. smaller raindrops (i.e., the drop size distribution). This uncertainty also impacts what you can estimate for the fall speed of the raindrops, and therefore the amount of liquid water accumulating at a given time. Most of the legacy schemes use a number of different Z-R (reflectivity rain rate) relationships that change depending on what environmental conditions are present. Basically, they have Z-R relationships for tropical rain that are different from summertime convective rain. Dual-pol reduces the drop size distribution (DSD) uncertainty because now multiple parameters (i.e., ZDR and reflectivity or KDP and reflectivity) provide independent information about the size and shape of the raindrops. Since raindrop shape depends on the size, the dual-pol variables give us more information about the DSD.

Getting back to snow, we still have all of the uncertainties I mentioned above, but there are a few more that make estimating snowfall very difficult. To get a snowfall rate, we basically need information about the mass of snow at some location and how fast it falls. The problem (or what makes it interesting, depending on your perspective) with snow is that there is a huge variation in the size and shape of ice particles. Small junky crystals scatter (respond to radar waves) very differently than large fluffy aggregates, or large wet aggregates, or beautiful stellar crystals/plates/dendrites/columns. Because they scatter differently, different combinations of each particle type can produce the same reflectivity, and potentially the same ZDR or KDP as well. Therefore, the radar signatures start to become ambiguous, even with dual-pol.

The other problem with snow and ice is that we don't have good observations or theoretical models of how fast different ice particles fall. We can't even estimate the particle fall speeds only with radar because, as I mentioned earlier, the radar signatures give ambiguous size and shape information, and we need this information to make a guess for the average fall speed of the sampled snow and ice particles. That makes estimating the snowfall rate difficult.

Now, you may actually be able to do something similar to the multiple Z-R relationships if you had a number of different Z-S relationships, depending on climatological radar and snow measurements, created by binning those measurements by environmental/storm conditions. On the other hand, snowfall measurements are inherently uncertain themselves...

And one very simple problem. How do account for compaction? 

[CoastalWx]

1 hour ago, ORH_wxman said:

'02-03 is like the 5th coldest winter at Logan airport. A lot of people probably didn't know it was that cold. Obviously snowy too though most of it was in a 4 week period there. Over the interior we got hit all winter. 

2000-2001 was pretty consistently great over the interior. There's a decent number of winters like that but I feel like many a weenie would have a serious problem with parts of those winters....because they all want Rangeley, ME for 4 months or the picnic tables for 4 months. 

 

02-03 is a great example. Even though this area had a crummy stretch, we always had threats even if we did not receive much snow from them. Obviously February was huge, but each month had its own fun you could say. Now the one theme these usually have is AN snowfall, so this is a bit of a weenie topic....but I do enjoy those spaced out seasons. 

[Allsnow]

1 hour ago, CoastalWx said:

I'm not even suggesting wire to wire. Just a 4 month season or so, that has some threats.  Even if there are lousy stretches....it makes the time go by for the season many look forward to.  I still think 02-03 is an underrated season by some.

I agree with this. I will take my avg sprinkled over 4 months without some horrible stretch of warm temps/cutters. It's just crazy how fast the winter goes when your in a bad stretch waiting for the next threat. Last December was absolutely horrible I never want to experience that again. 

[heavy_wx]

49 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

And one very simple problem. How do account for compaction? 

Yup, definitely another source of error. I will say that the dual-pol observations can give a pretty good indication of vigorous dendritic/plate-like growth if there is a clear KDP enhancement, enhanced ZDR, and a large vertical gradient in ZH. This signature has been associated with enhanced surface precipitation rates in one study in CO (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JAMC2558.1) and has been studied in a number of other papers. Enhanced dendritic growth may be related to higher snow-liquid ratios, so perhaps there is some hope in using this signature operationally.

Unfortunately for winter storm purposes, the WSR-88D radars transmit radiation at S band, making enhancements in KDP smaller vs. observations at C or X band. You do see nice KDP enhancements in some of the more intense snow bands where upward vertical motion is found near -15C, but KDP from the WSR-88D radars often doesn't look that impressive during many snow events.

[dryslot]

5 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

 

It does happen sometimes....2010-2011:

 

I would sign up for that

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

Thanks heavywx for the tech side on radar. I know it is more complex than just doing x with y as i made it sound like, otherwise it would have been created already lol. Im not asking for perfection though, just something even as "accurate" as weenies measuring in their yards with a slanted ruler.  

[Ginx snewx]

02/03 blows away the competition for a great snow depth days total long deep winter. Sign me up. Don't need storms every week just enough refreshers and cold  to keep it white

 

Snow

Nov         Dec        Jan        Feb        March     April

9.5

15.7

13.6

33.0

12.8

3.9

Temp

39.4

29.4

20.7

23.6

36.4

43.7

Number of days with greater than 1" of snow depth

Nov         Dec        Jan        Feb        March     April

4

24

31

28

20

3

Number of days with greater than 1" snowfall

2

5

8

7

3

2

 

% of days with at least 1" of snow OTG

13 Nov

77 Dec

100 Jan

100 Feb

65 March

10 April

 

 

[40/70 Benchmark]

I need storms to track....but I'm fine with a boring spell if we get a 2011-1996-2015-2001 type stretch.

[40/70 Benchmark]

It seems to me that the fall build up reached a fever pitch over the course of the last couple of seasons, but it just isn't there this year. Much less posting activity, and the SAI has lost some clout.

I think the failure that followed last season's epic build up has let the air out of the fall balloon for many...I know I'm not as into it this fall.

[Damage In Tolland]

2 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

It seems to me that the fall build up reached a fever pitch over the course of the last couple of seasons, but it just isn't there this year. Much less posting activity, and the SAI has lost some clout.

I think the failure that followed last season's epic build up has let the air out of the fall balloon for many...I know I'm not as into it this fall.

Folks are worried..and rightly so

[40/70 Benchmark]

1 minute ago, Damage In Tolland said:

Folks are worried..and rightly so

That isn't my point, but the blizzard worked out, anyway.

 

The point is, whether it be angst or optimism, activity is down across the board.

[Damage In Tolland]

10 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

That isn't my point, but the blizzard worked out, anyway.

 

The point is, whether it be angst or optimism, activity is down across the board.

Because folks are very worried and concerned about some of the negative things the atmosphere and pattern is showing us. Maybe a little bit of boy who cried wolf from last year..but given how things look..I don't think anyone is all that excited for big winter

[40/70 Benchmark]

Just now, Damage In Tolland said:

Because folks are very worried and concerned about some of the negative things the atmosphere and pattern is showing us. Maybe a little bit of boy who cried wolf from last year..but given how things look..I don't think anyone is all the excited for big winter

I'm not sure which way I'm leaning TBH.....the QBO and IOD give me pause, but I think everything else looks as good as it can this early, which isn't saying a ton.

 

[ORH_wxman]

31 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

It seems to me that the fall build up reached a fever pitch over the course of the last couple of seasons, but it just isn't there this year. Much less posting activity, and the SAI has lost some clout.

I think the failure that followed last season's epic build up has let the air out of the fall balloon for many...I know I'm not as into it this fall.

 

Winter forecasting is hard. There's always discussion when some new stuff comes out, and then it dies down again once it is realized that nothing can hit a seasonal forecast with accuracy that many folks want.

 

It is particularly true for New England and the metric that just about everyone cares about...snowfall. We have basically no correlation to most of this crap that goes into a seasonal forecast (ENSO, QBO, PDO, IO, etc)...most of the stuff that would be useful isn't very predictable such as the NAO. It's easier to predict temps for a place like the southeast U.S. or parts of the west coast where the ENSO correlation is higher.

 

I cannot remember how many times since like 2000 when I was lurking on ne.weather when everything looked awesome for a winter and it sucked or vice-versa (remember the torches predicted before the strong Nino of 2010-2011 or the epic winter forecasts before 2001-2002?). Sometimes, winter looked horrible for many in the east but we would make out great like 2007-2008 or to a lesser extent 2012-2013.

 

I'd probably never feel good about a single set of variables in SNE for snowfall...ok, maybe predict above average snowfall in a weak Nino...lol...but that's it.

[Ginx snewx]

42 minutes ago, Damage In Tolland said:

Folks are worried..and rightly so

I see zero worry from anyone??? Climo normal seems a good bet