December Discussion II

[SnowGoose69]

20 minutes ago, qg_omega said:

Mid Atlantic winter of YORE

The southern MA and southeast can actually score in our crappy winters on occasion because the combination of the pacific jet and positive NAO prevent the system from phasing and or climbing the coast.  Someone posted the example of this yesterday.  The 91-92, 01-02, and 11-12 winters all snow significant snow events down in the southeast 

[HoarfrostHubb]

The 1978 Blizzard fell on what was essentially bare ground. The previous storm (which had been Boston’s record up until Feb) got wiped out by the Cleveland Superbomb.  2015 had some areas with greater depths

[Baroclinic Zone]

1.12”

[78Blizzard]

In comparing the blizzards of 1978 and 2015, I'm reminded of the column Jon Keller of WBZ wrote shortly after the 2015 event comparing the two events.

Back in 1978 the blizzard brought people together, neighbor helping neighbor, strangers looking out for each other. After the 2015 blizzard, it was much easier to just retreat into your electronic cocoon.

And one more major difference - in 1978, when the snow melted and summer came, you knew the Red Sox would find a way to blow it. Nowadays, they’re just as likely to win it all again.

 

[kdxken]

3 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

Where are you looking for these stats? Isn't kdxken in Brighton? (And a place in sherborn maybe?) Both of those locations had well over 100" in 2014-2015. 

You don't miss much . Right on all  counts.

[ORH_wxman]

53 minutes ago, HoarfrostHubb said:

The 1978 Blizzard fell on what was essentially bare ground. The previous storm (which had been Boston’s record up until Feb) got wiped out by the Cleveland Superbomb.  2015 had some areas with greater depths

There was actually still pretty significant glacier cover after the super bomb. 11" depth at ORH and even 6-7" around BOS immediate suburbs. I think Logan though had maybe only 3" remaining. 

[40/70 Benchmark]

5 hours ago, TauntonBlizzard2013 said:

We had a rogue half foot in November and 2 traces in the nearly two months since. I don’t think anyone could or would argue this winter has been all time suck so far.

We have a lot of ground to make up. I’m skeptical that we keep doing this every year, eventually, we won’t pull it out.

Well see, long way to go, but I understand the frustration. Another holiday season flushed and heading into Jan with nothing positive on the horizon, at least in the medium term.

Is what it is.

Eventually we won't....but my money is on that not occuring in a weak modoki, solar min season with a SSW.

[8611Blizz]

I don't have any specific memories about the Jan. 22nd storm but my dad who plowed it said that only some snow piles remained after a week or so and he (and the rest of the Boston area) were very grateful for that soon after..

[HoarfrostHubb]

1 hour ago, ORH_wxman said:

There was actually still pretty significant glacier cover after the super bomb. 11" depth at ORH and even 6-7" around BOS immediate suburbs. I think Logan though had maybe only 3" remaining. 

I know there was enough glacier to slide down our hill at our school (that collapsed), but only a couple of inches iirc

[weathafella]

I just remember leaving to move to LA in mid November 1976 after a series of decent but often frustrating winters.   My first years there all hell breaks loose here.   We all have life disappointments-stuff we didn’t do or stuff we shouldn’t have done.  I will go to my grave with the sting of Great blizzard of 1978.

[Randy4Confluence]

33 minutes ago, weathafella said:

I just remember leaving to move to LA in mid November 1976 after a series of decent but often frustrating winters.   My first years there all hell breaks loose here.   We all have life disappointments-stuff we didn’t do or stuff we shouldn’t have done.  I will go to my grave with the sting of Great blizzard of 1978.

This makes me realize that I'm fortunate to take with me to California  Feb 2015, winter '13-'14, winter '02-'03, and countless isolated events outside of these periods. Been there and done that. And so it helps me join in embracing the warmth. Although this year's "Winter" has been warmer than I'd like it ( We've been running estimating  10 above normal this year).

 

Otherwise, I would have fealt how you did in LA during those years probably. 

[DavisStraight]

I'd gladly give up Dec and half of January for a 2015 type blitz, not saying we're getting it this year but one can dream.

[Greg]

8 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

Where are you looking for these stats? Isn't kdxken in Brighton? (And a place in sherborn maybe?) Both of those locations had well over 100" in 2014-2015. 

His location on his avatar said Southborough, so I looked up and compared the COOP data when he made the comment.

[Greg]

9 hours ago, CoastalWx said:

29”? Where? Everyone had more at some point.

For the Southborough area. The stat I gave wasn't for everybody only to the poster I commented on.  His avatar read "Location Southborough" and was commenting on the '78 winter in his area and the '15 winter.  That's all.

[LibertyBell]

16 hours ago, Isotherm said:

 

@CoastalWx @40/70 Benchmark

 

This is in response to both of your inquiries.

I concur that it was easier to see from about the middle point of the month, once it became ostensible that the MJO would continue intensifying further beyond low-orbit. However, my contention is that this was not easily foreseen from the pre-season period in November, and but for the stratospheric induced MJO amplification, December would have finished less warm, and likely with more snow in the Northeast than it did. The literature demonstrates a trop-->strat-->trop pathway, whereby heightened tropospheric induced stratospheric perturbation, climaxing in a sudden warming event, can operate on a dual pathway, with the stratosphere thereupon modulating the intraseasonal signal and further amplifying it. This significant, anomalous amplification of the MJO, in my opinion, as a consequence of the major stratospheric event, was the curveball. A low-orbit MJO would not have ruined late December, in light of other background signals, which favored cooler December. I believe the argument has merit, further, as December was cooler than average through the latter point of the month, at which time the intraseasonal signal amplified materially, driving trough after trough into the Western US. There are numerous cases historically in which the MJO amplifies significantly contemporaneously with a significant stratospheric event, and this is not a coincidence in my view, due to the dual feedback pathway. We saw it last year, for example, wherein the MJO amplified quite strongly prior to the sudden warming event.

So, when I say, curveball/largely unforeseeable, I'm referring to from early/mid November, not a couple weeks ago. Yes, canonical Nino analogs supported a warm December, but we were not following the canonical Nino playbook as far as how we arrived at the result in my opinion. The primary reason for the decline of the pattern late December was the amplification of the intraseasonal signal, brought about largely by feedback from stratospheric modulation.

So, Ray, we'll have to agree to disagree on how the results arrived the way they did for December - as in my view, background signals supported a normal or cooler December. My initial winter forecast included a non-SSW year, so again, the resolution of it is immaterial to the rest of the winter, but I strongly believe this trop-strat->MJO interference aided significantly in hampering winter chances in the Northeast in late December.

Tom, it's hard to argue that it's been a canonical El Nino pattern when everyone seems to agree that the atmosphere has been behaving much more like a La Nina with the SOI values rather than an El Nino.

[Isotherm]

6 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

Tom, it's hard to argue that it's been a canonical El Nino pattern when everyone seems to agree that the atmosphere has been behaving much more like a La Nina with the SOI values rather than an El Nino.

 

Yes, that was my point - that December was not a canonical-Nino pattern. It was more Nina-esque. CONUS temperature departures were running cooler than normal until the MJO began to amplify, "out of control" in the warm phases, due in part to stratospheric elicited feedback / convective growth, in my view.

[Hoth]

I'm a simple man. I just want a Feb '13 style deform band. Is that so much to ask?

[Ginx snewx]

12 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

There was actually still pretty significant glacier cover after the super bomb. 11" depth at ORH and even 6-7" around BOS immediate suburbs. I think Logan though had maybe only 3" remaining. 

Definitely bare at URI, flurries that started at 11 AM stuck immediately though. From flurries to 4 inches in a half hour drive home. 

[Ginx snewx]

22 minutes ago, Isotherm said:

 

Yes, that was my point - that December was not a canonical-Nino pattern. It was more Nina-esque. CONUS temperature departures were running cooler than normal until the MJO began to amplify, "out of control" in the warm phases, due in part to stratospheric elicited feedback / convective growth, in my view.

Agree the ocean was not coupled at all

[Ginx snewx]

12 hours ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

Eventually we won't....but my money is on that not occuring in a weak modoki, solar min season with a SSW.

Lots of SSWs never downwell I believe the stat is 40 plus percent.  There has been a persistent deep low directly over the NPole which has acted like a psuedo PV mucking up flow. Until the Pac jet flow slows and the Atlantic buckles we are subject to fast flow with Pac air. Having a TPV over Europe will slow the Atlantic, your timing looks great as of today..

[40/70 Benchmark]

Yea, nothing is a sure bet, Steve, but I'll take my chances here.

Agreed.

[40/70 Benchmark]

36 minutes ago, Isotherm said:

 

Yes, that was my point - that December was not a canonical-Nino pattern. It was more Nina-esque. CONUS temperature departures were running cooler than normal until the MJO began to amplify, "out of control" in the warm phases, due in part to stratospheric elicited feedback / convective growth, in my view.

Exactly correct. December was even colder than some other slow starting weak modoki years.

[weathafella]

1 hour ago, Hoth said:

I'm a simple man. I just want a Feb '13 style deform band. Is that so much to ask?

https://youtu.be/n6TjKtlNvhg

[Typhoon Tip]

1 hour ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

Exactly correct. December was even colder than some other slow starting weak modoki years.

I realize this doesn't seem to resonate too well in this particular, internet social-media community but...  I believe the warmer overall Terran atmosphere is possibly disrupting the correlations.

I have noticed an ...albeit ostensible failure between event/phenomenon quotas that are more typically ensuing during/because of various ENSO states over the last ten years.  That may not seem to be a large enough data set to really get one's knickers in a bunch. It's only tens years. But, let us not focus on that "ten year" time span; that is a ten years that happens to have a huge, packed set of expectation that did not appear to materialize, or if so ... did so in pallid fashion.  Something is causing weaker responses ...

And honestly that can be vetted further.  I'm more at tacitly aware.  The tenor of mass-media over those ten years may simply be not able to make money off that so being an enterprise they headline elsewhere... But, just the same, my attention is devoted, my nose into science sites and sources, regularly, that are referencing papered/reviewed works over the years, as well. 

See ... it goes like:  those correlations are based upon results during different gradient-balancing(ed)-years. I've explained this in the past...  I'm not sure folks really get what that means, ...But, a 30-year oceanic-atmospheric coupled data set are first, fixed scalar results (ENSO), back whence. The problem is ... then being used during a changing system - in physical terms "accelerating", i.e., not a system that is producing those scalars.

While not a red flag necessarily ... certainly that should tilt up an eyebrow. 

Maybe these "modoki" this and uncharacteristic La Nina thats are just a demonstration of that "gap growing" disconnect. Most climate scientists, models, and the empirical data that supports the entire panoply of environmental monitoring ...all of it signal the climate change is indeed a d(accelerating) phenomenon.  In other words, not just changing but speeding up in that change.

I've said this before ...I'll say it again ... gradient gradient gradient. It's everything. It's a rudimentary principle requirement of reality its self ... Without it, Nature stops on a dime. Everything in the Universe ceases to exist ...  if there are no gradients. One's very heart beat is based upon chemo-guided electrical gradients, where potential builds, the gate opens, physically expressed by the heart beat... Gate closes... potential builds up... and you'd better hope it rinses and repeats or its adios muchacho. And that includes where the wind blows ...

The SSTs of the Pac NINO districts may not mean the same thing to this era's atmosphere, compared to 1918 gradients... or even the middle part of last century when the cause-and-effect oceanic-atmospheric coupling and expectation matrices were established.  Because we are changing the gradients in the total integral of the system.  To say otherwise to me is tantamount to changing the relationships between people and then expecting them to relate in the same way - paradox.

In a way, it's almost a comic of follies ... All the pouring over data set of ENSO this and that spanning years ...balanced against all a dizzying array of multifarious, esoteric this and that... when before even attempting that crucible in the first place ... the ENSO part of it may in fact be losing relevancy.  "losing" doesn't mean "lost" either... so -

[40/70 Benchmark]

4 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

I realize this doesn't seem to resonate too well in this particular, internet social-media community but...  I believe the warmer overall Terran atmosphere is possibly disrupting the correlations.

I have noticed an ...albeit ostensible failure between event/phenomenon quotas that are more typically ensuing during/because of various ENSO states over the last ten years.  That may not seem to be a large enough data set to really get one's knickers in a bunch ... ? But, let us not focus on that "ten year" time span; that is a ten years that happens to have a huge, packed set of expectation that did not appear to materialize, or if so ... did so in pallid fashion.  Something is causing weaker responses ...

And honestly that can be vetted further.  I'm more at tacitly aware.  The tenor mass-media over those ten years may simply be not able to make money off that so being an enterprise they headline elsewhere... But, just the same, my nose is science sites regularly that are referencing papered/reviewed works over the years, too. 

See ... it goes like:  those correlations are based upon results during different gradient-balancing(ed)-years. I've explained this in the past...  I'm not sure folks really get what that means, ...But, a 30-year oceanic-atmospheric coupled data set are first, fixed scalar results (ENSO), back whence. The problem is ... then being used during a changing system - in physical terms "accelerating", i.e., not a system that is producing those scalars.

While not a red flag necessarily ... certainly that should tilt up an eyebrow. 

Maybe these "modoki" this and uncharacteristic La Nina thats are just a demonstration of that "gap growing" disconnect. Most climate scientists, models, and the empirical data that supports the entire panoply of environmental monitoring ...all of it signal the climate change is indeed an d(accelerating) phenomenon.  In other words, not just changing but speeding up in that change.

I've said this before ...I'll say it again ... gradient gradient gradient. It's everything. Rudimentary principle requirement of reality its self really ... Without it, Nature stops on a dime. Everything in the Universe ceases to exist ...  if there are no gradients. One's very heart beat is based upon electronic/chemical generate gradients, where potential builds, the gate opens, physically expressed by the heart beat... Gate closes... potential builds up... and you'd better hope it rinses and repeats or its adios muchacho. And that includes where the wind blows ...

The SSTs of the Pac NINO districts may not mean the same thing to this era's atmosphere, compared to 1918 gradients... or even the middle part of last century when the cause-and-effect matrix of oceanic-atmospheric coupling was established.  Because we are changing the integral of the system of gradients. 

In a way, it's almost a comic of follies ... All the pouring over data set of ENSO this and that spanning years ...balanced against all, and the ENSO part of it may in fact be almost irrelevant if the "change" isn't somehow integral in that process. Which may be ... I don't know for certain - doesn't seem like it is though. At all echelons of sophistication ... the application appears pretty linear/literal to me.

I've seen you make this point before, acknowledged it and don't necessarily think its wrong, but until a I see a season of this ilk behave drastically different than expected, I'm not really ready to entertain it.

The dearth of snow thus far is not enough to convince me of that. Talk to me in two months...I get your point, though.

[Typhoon Tip]

19 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

I've seen you make this point before, acknowledged it and don't necessarily think its wrong, but until a I see a season of this ilk behave drastically different than expected, I'm not really ready to entertain it.

The dearth of snow thus far is not enough to convince me of that. Talk to me in two months...I get your point, though.

 

Thing is... it occurred to me back post the super-nino ... was that like three years ago now. No ..can't be that far, is it? I think it was 2016 ... Anyway, the global impacts from that "super nino" ...didn't generate much vitriol in the headlines.  And I sniffed around ... why? Because there wasn't much.  I even saw papers written ...articles that also discussed plausible explanations why.  

I'm sure the impacts of that event were registered somewhere some how more or less.. but, it didn't concomitantly result comparative to the anomaly its self.  

We have to be careful... it's not black or white, either.  It's more how factors and forces stress systems - or can ... gradient distribution - which is also a changing in time.  So it's more like pushing results up and down a spectrum.  In a colder atmosphere overall, introducing a hot-house SST inferno ENSO up underneath is going to result a coherent registry of observations in the atmosphere.  I'm highly confident there is veracity in at least that baser precept.  And if that's true ... logically the rest follows.

Yeah... supposition... but, if the atmosphere is 90 F everywhere, and the water is 90 F everywhere... what does one think will happen? ...

[das]

25 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

I've seen you make this point before, acknowledged it and don't necessarily think its wrong, but until a I see a season of this ilk behave drastically different than expected, I'm not really ready to entertain it.

Having read your stuff (from afar from the MId-Atlantic forum) over the years, I am surprised by this comment. @Typhoon Tip is simply expressing a well-understood inverse notion in physics; the Law of Constants. It basically states the tenants of physical constant, which is any set of fundamental invariant quantities observed in nature that are the foundation for the basic theoretical equations of physics. On which meteorology is based.  Tip rightly assesses that those observed qualities that make up the equations that represent ENSO, MJO, etc... are changing and the slope of that change is accelerating.  They are the furthest thing from invariant these days. 

[Greg]

16 hours ago, kdxken said:

 

 

[kdxken]

23 minutes ago, Greg said:

Unless your location on your avatar is wrong "Southborough" then my stats that I showed you are correct.  Other wise prove me wrong.

 Hi Greg , Southborough it's currently one of my locations :-) didn't mean to ruffle any feathers . I like your posts btw. Peace out ...

[weathafella]

1 minute ago, kdxken said:

 Hi Greg , Southborough it's currently one of my locations :-) didn't mean to ruffle any feathers . I like your posts btw. Peace out ...

Lol..tycoon!