So here was the evolution of my forecast...
Monday morning...
Tuesday morning..
Starting in New England the forecast worked out really well. A little on the light side as the upper end was over 15" and there were some 18" totals near Boston. The snow did make it inland like I expected.
For NJ the forecast worked out very well for all areas of the interior but was too light for the coastal areas. In my 6-12" zone the totals were more like 10-18" (Brick NJ highest at 18").
Overall I did alright with this one. I had a handle on the west shift ahead of time and for the most part hopefully gave everyone an advanced warning compared to other places on the potential of this thing. I will let you guys be the judge.
So moving on...sub zero cold moves in this weekend...
Highs will stay in low teens today and crash into the low single digits tonight. Subzero will be frequent in the north (click to make bigger)..
The coldest air is Sunday morning where even NJ can go sub zero...
Things will then moderate by the middle of next week.
On Monday, there is a chance at snow as energy will be moving through the area. At this time I do not expect anything major but will monitor closely.
We then need to look towards next weekend for a potential bigger storm. There is a silver lining to all this however as it appears a January thaw is on its way after next week. This means mild temps can take over for 2 weeks or so.
Thats all for now I will update again sometime this weekend.
Hey Willy -- yea, that was a lot of weather energy expressing itself yesterday. My very rough observations were about 4 to 5 inches in downtown Newark and about 3 to 4 inches in Montclair. I realize that it was tough to get a good non-instrumental reading yesterday because of the wind, but I found a few wind coves where I could stick my glove into the snow. I know that the spotter figures from the area were a bit higher, and the official EWR total was around 8. But I think that was fluff -- literally, because the snow was very fluffy when it first hit the ground, given the cold and wind whipping it up. It was probably way over the usual 10-1 inch snow-to-liquid ratio. I did my glove measurements later in the day, after the pack might have settled a little.
ReplyDeleteSo, as far as a snow generator, I'd give this storm a "meh". But that wind . . . I was out shoveling at around 8 pm, when the back end of the cyclone was passing. And of course, simple physics say that the edge of a disk spins the fastest, has the highest forward velocity. Those edge-winds were really howling, the most impressive (and scary) wind event I've experienced since Sandy. Luckily, the gusts stayed below 40 mph and we didn't lose power or have any trees crashing down.
So the post-Christmas cold wave continues thru the weekend. What gets me is that the polar vortex, arctic oscillation, and NAO appear to have little to do with it!! OK, there were some spikes in polar stratospheric temps in December, maybe that contributed somewhat -- but their magnitude seems moderate at best. The polar winds have been pretty much zonal thru now, and the AO and NAO have been neutral to positive (albeit the AO went slightly negative in the last day or two). The Pacific drivers seem to be in the drivers seat, with a strong + PNA and strong - EPO. And then there is the La Nina and the QBO -- those QBO equatorial winds are strongly anti-zonal, quite a flip from last year. I don't have easy access to good archival data, so I haven't come up with previous winters where that situation held. But the negative QBO and moderate LaNina seem like a potent combination in affecting the NE USA weather basin.
Interestingly though, two other Pacific factors, the MJO and PDO, have been fairly neutral in recent weeks. I would guess (on a SWAG basis) that non-involvement by the PDO indicates that the north Pacific isn't doing much driving right now (maybe that makes sense since the Arctic isn't doing much either); it's the equatorial Pacific that's causing us to freeze our keisters here in the eastern US. Who'd have thunk?
The million-dollar question of course is whether this set-up holds thru the winter or is just a transient state. That's what makes weather patterns so much fun, since even the experts still don't have it all down yet !!
Jim G
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