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Countdown to Winter 2017-2018 Thread


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21 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

2013-2014 wasn't a terrible pack winter...it was really up and down in Dec/Jan, but it did get going in February for sustained pack. It was a bit better up in NNE late that winter...I remember going up to Sunday River and driving up on March 23rd, 2014...they had about 50 inches on the level once I got to about Bridgeton and beyond.

2013-14 ranks 2nd here for SDDs with 2,831, though way behind 07-08 and only a couple dozen ahead of this past winter.  30"+ in Dec, Feb, and March will do that, and your trip on 3/23 came shortly after the last major snowfall that winter.

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in 1883 Boston had a great week leading up to Christmas...they got 23" of snow with very cold temps...It probably is the greatest snowy period leading up to and including Christmas day in NYC and maybe all of New England...

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1883-12-24/ed-1/seq-1/

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1883-12-26/ed-1/seq-5/

 

 

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On July 29, 2017 at 9:57 AM, CoastalWx said:

The atmosphere over the Pacific is still in Nina mode. So while models are going neutral give or take, it will be interesting to see how the atmosphere adjusts heading into Fall. 

I mentioned in my last blog update that the -QBO warm-neutral ENSO composite hinted at a nina hangover..

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52 minutes ago, TauntonBlizzard2013 said:

That's something we wouldn't want to see, correct?

I mean, I'd rather see weak Nino, but its not a death knell.....it does make the NAO a bit more important, though.

Ideally, we'd see a bit of a nina hangover through December, transitioning to more of a weak el nino as the season progressed. lol

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2 hours ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

I mean, I'd rather see weak Nino, but its not a death knell.....it does make the NAO a bit more important, though.

Ideally, we'd see a bit of a nina hangover through December, transitioning to more of a weak el nino as the season progressed. lol

Ala '95-'96 and '76-'77. A couple of the few "wire to wire" type winters...though each had some brief annoying periods like parts of Feb '77 (or more like 2+ weeks in Jan '96).

 

Really the ideal scenario is a weak El Nino where you steal a good December.

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I think the clearest path to a terd is the arctic/Atlantic going to crap again, and the el nino failing.

I'm not expecting the former, although I don't expect huge blocking, either.

May very well remain neutral ENSO, though.

 

We need to root for a modest el nino, though because that also makes the hostile polar/Atlantic couplet less likely.

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11 hours ago, CoastalWx said:

  I'm craving a decent December. It's been like pulling teeth. Winter starting in later Jan or Feb gets old. It's been years since we had a decent December here. I guess 2013 was ok, but the snow did not last long. 

We were spoiled in the 2000s decade with all those big Decembers. 

 

Though I should say last December wasn't that bad in the interior. ORH finished with 17.5 inches...above average. Wasn't much of a white Christmas though...patchy snow....up by Hubbdave kept the snow cover though. We had that nice little paste bomb on Dec 29th which was fun and more than half of the month did have snow cover over the elevated interior. The warm sector was annoying though in the Dec 17-18 storm. If we had managed to CAD in that storm, the month would have felt a lot more wintry.

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Oh man - don't get me started on the lack of front-end loading ... 

Thing is, I'm almost inclined to think that we've been (sort of) conditioned over the last couple decades to thinking they are more common then climo ? 

It's just that when I first moved to this part of the country as an early teen ....waaay back ten minutes or so after the dinosaurs went extinct... I was trying to familiarize my self with the local climate any way I could. I was such a dork - sparking up conversations about the weather in any setting in veritable reality at almost not excuse at all (forget least excuse!).

It was like one of those good looking girls you manage to strike up a conversation with and seemingly having 0 provocation whatsoever they manage to mention their boyfriend ? 

That was me with the weather ...  oh man.  funny.

Anyway, the annuls and stories, and real history ...from anecdotal to fact and back ... it all painted a region that tended to get most of its snow "after" Christmas.  It was like the 'white-Christmas' version of the New England sports fan:  One error by the Short-Stop and it's hands up, eyes-rollin' in the worst impenetrable self-defeatism assumptions of failure since a suicide case was asked to clean a gun.  It could be snowing, S+ on December 24 at 8 pm and people were resolute in the notion that it will turn to rain and sky-rocket to 58 F some how, some way ...before the dawn of the 25th.   Heh.  It really was quite remarkable how bitter people were about that particular obsessive idea of whether xmass was actually going to be white or not.  

Then, it was qualitatively annoying, too.  Like, are there snow patches, or is there a snow pack spread evenly?  Is there snow on the ground while raining at 42 over top?  Is there snow actually falling ...  ?  It all mattered... If there was anything at all tainting the mystique of the perfect Norman Rockwell icicles hangin' from the eaves, with snow-globe blobs out the window, a fire in the fire-place and 'Nog in the punch bowl then it didn't count: the Short-Stop bunked it -  

Expectations for the Holiday(s), however fair or realistic, aside... we flat out have not really had many front-side winters since...  gosh I wanna say 2008 ?  There may have been others that qualify (somewhere amid the tainted versions as mused above...).  But, 2008, and 2007 actually... those years flat out dumped pig snow and stayed cold the way I remembered it...from early Dec onward.  

Others probably have mentioned but 1995 is the ultimate pinnacle year of early winter performance.   We got a snow and sleety deal around the ..10th or so of November. I was living and schooling up at UML in the Merrimack Valley that year, and that was the last time we saw bare ground until a vicious thaw came in and dinked the perfect winter in late January that year.

There's never been a 100 %  A++ score-card; that's probably more like a theoretical state that cannot actually be achieved... like arriving to the end of a asymptotic slope in mathematical parlance.  It's always somewhere out there where the gap between utter perfection and distraction is remarkably narrow...but there's always gotta be a f'n gap to leave one pondering 'what if.'   More often than not, the grade falls well short of even that level of perfection. 

Thing is... I knew in mid October that year that something was different.  I couldn't put a finger on it.. but, we just started achieving cold temperatures during good radiator nights well prior to Hallow's Eve.  The colors on the trees were vibrant, as leaves froze then flitted to the ground on calm mornings with side-ways corpuscular rays cutting through the morning chilly mist. I was remember walking across University Ave bridge there that spans the Merrimack river from Fox Tower ...to and fro classes.  Other than not realizing how good I had it in life in those days ... I remember seeing ice clinging to the granite blocks that were used to construct the aqueduct. When the river was at capacity or so....the canal would fill.  The hydro pressure would squeeze water through the cracks of the granite blocks from high up along the wall just before the damn-control spill way emptied there close by where Pawtucket St connects with Father Morissette Blv.   Those small cascading rivulets were tending to ice by the 15th of October, and, would stay ice during the afternoons, too (that side of the spill-way faced the N..)  We were putting up high temperatures of 42 to 44 F with lows in the 20s unusually and routinely before Halloween that year.  

"Weather" it warmed up or not before that first snow and sleet even earlier in November (in fact ...I think it may have), it was out-muscled by the lasting tenor of a cold autumn already winning the character of that year's transition.  And all the while...it may have just been the unconscious awareness of said trend(s), I dunno - but it was painfully obvious we were not going to wait long to get the incoming season underway.  Phew.  man did we!  

Ever since than I cannot help but compare a given October in my mind and memories, to that fateful year ... as a kind of barometer for how the transition season is going. It may not ultimately mean much?  Okay - and there are those that don't like to face reality that will claim that warm vs cool Octobers don't mean sh!t and ...I won't actually argue. That may be right.  However, since then...22 years... I have never seen a cold October like that, and an ensuing ND to early J behave like Homer Simpson in Hell on Ned Flanders stuffing machine ..only instead doughnuts the glut punishment being snow, like we ate that year.  

 

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4 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

We were spoiled in the 2000s decade with all those big Decembers. 

 

Though I should say last December wasn't that bad in the interior. ORH finished with 17.5 inches...above average. Wasn't much of a white Christmas though...patchy snow....up by Hubbdave kept the snow cover though. We had that nice little paste bomb on Dec 29th which was fun and more than half of the month did have snow cover over the elevated interior. The warm sector was annoying though in the Dec 17-18 storm. If we had managed to CAD in that storm, the month would have felt a lot more wintry.

That was an amazing December pattern from 2000 to 2010 with the record breaking -AO/-NAO and snowfall. Quite a dramatic reversal during 2011-2016 with the record warmth and raging positive AO/ NAO.  

 

A.png.1c3f69f4c3f1d6d7dfef738cf2acf9a6.png

B.png.600f3b50a26894ecf34d51abaf829858.png

 

AO.png.3b0445290756a4b741fc1cf921da5a77.png

 

 

 

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19 hours ago, CoastalWx said:

  I'm craving a decent December. It's been like pulling teeth. Winter starting in later Jan or Feb gets old. It's been years since we had a decent December here. I guess 2013 was ok, but the snow did not last long. 

We start contemplating winter earlier and earlier, and then winter weather comes later and later.  December duds are all too common recently.  The last December to remember was probably the one that including Boxing Day down our way.  We have had a few snowy starts back in the mid 2000's, but thats as good as my memory gets.  And the issue isn't just snowfall - its heat.  At least with cold you get some mood flakes and the models will tease you with something to track.  I'd sign up for that even over coin toss chances between last december and a snowyish one (unless snow means Boxing Day - one of the best christmas presents I ever got).  

I like visiting you guys up here.  I know I can drop in on August 1 and there are reems of posts to read about Winter.

I am behind and need to catch up to the latest thinking.  The case for cold and snow is strong on this forum  ;-)

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1 hour ago, weathafella said:

Steven Spielberg laughing while  Gremlins de-ball Leon.

If the -EPO/+NAO regime continues and we get a neutral ENSO...Leon could make an appearance. Those parameters would be the same background state.

 

31 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

I'm hoping for Thanksgiving '89 personally with a hair to the NW.

We're kind of due for a SE November storm...Nov 2014 and Nov 2012 were both north and west storms...2012 was better closer to the coast than 2014 was, but both kind of screwed SE MA and the immediate coast. Nov '89, Nov '95, Nov '02, and Nov '04 were all pretty good in SE areas.

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1 hour ago, ORH_wxman said:

If the -EPO/+NAO regime continues and we get a neutral ENSO...Leon could make an appearance. Those parameters would be the same background state.

We're kind of due for a SE November storm...Nov 2014 and Nov 2012 were both north and west storms...2012 was better closer to the coast than 2014 was, but both kind of screwed SE MA and the immediate coast. Nov '89, Nov '95, Nov '02, and Nov '04 were all pretty good in SE areas.

Yeah November 2014 was the PF 600mb storm where no models had more than 2-4" and we got lucky with very high level deform band and 10-14".  Even the 700mb plots didn't show anything exciting but somehow 600mb got it done.

Wasn't that one a ton of heavy wet snow damage near Dendrite and northern SNE?

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