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Post by Snowman99 on Jan 4, 2021 8:46:06 GMT -6
Lots of FB memories today of the jan 4 2014 storm. Good times. Makes me sad. lol
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Post by cardsnweather on Jan 4, 2021 8:51:54 GMT -6
Lots of FB memories today of the jan 4 2014 storm. Good times. Makes me sad. lol The storm that shut down the corner! |
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Post by STGOutdoors on Jan 4, 2021 8:57:05 GMT -6
Well the nam is heading south for the wed night/thurs system so that’s not good.
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Post by John G -west belleville on Jan 4, 2021 9:18:23 GMT -6
How about the fog this morning?
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Post by Snowstorm920 on Jan 4, 2021 9:35:50 GMT -6
Well the nam is heading south for the wed night/thurs system so that’s not good. We’ve been missed every other direction so may as well get missed to the south |
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Post by Tilawn on Jan 4, 2021 9:55:49 GMT -6
How about the fog this morning? Thick as pea soup around 2:30 this morning......couldn’t see my salt bin from 200’ away and the area is lit which didn’t help. |
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Post by amstilost on Jan 4, 2021 10:08:38 GMT -6
Looking at 500mb vort charts the 12z GFS looks to miss us a little to the west then south...not sure if we had that miss before. Jokes aside, the GFS is quite a bit stronger than the NAM, but the NAM appears to go negative tilt, and the GFS remains positive to neutral tilt going off the east coast. With the NAO being negative it doesn't make sense to me (still novice) that the GFS would remain positive/neutral in this pattern. Any explanations or am I not seeing something??
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Post by STGOutdoors on Jan 4, 2021 10:23:33 GMT -6
I don't reckon we could pull that weekend storm north could we? Where's the big pull NW when you need it...
Para GFS is trying to. Normally that's the kind of storm that does come north in the 4/5 day range but since that would put it in our wheelhouse that seems unlikely these days haha.
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Post by unclesam6 on Jan 4, 2021 10:35:23 GMT -6
Well the nam is heading south for the wed night/thurs system so that’s not good. We’ve been missed every other direction so may as well get missed to the south Didn't we get missed to the south by that Branson storm a few weeks ago? |
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Post by Worldserieschampions (Chicago) on Jan 4, 2021 10:37:36 GMT -6
I don't reckon we could pull that weekend storm north could we? Where's the big pull NW when you need it... Para GFS is trying to. Normally that's the kind of storm that does come north in the 4/5 day range but since that would put it in our wheelhouse that seems unlikely these days haha. Painful watching it just sheer out instead of turning the corner and strengthen in our wheelhouse. Might need to take a break from the models and just reevaluate in a week. It’s getting awfully frustrating |
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Post by jmg378s on Jan 4, 2021 10:52:43 GMT -6
Looking at 500mb vort charts the 12z GFS looks to miss us a little to the west then south...not sure if we had that miss before. Jokes aside, the GFS is quite a bit stronger than the NAM, but the NAM appears to go negative tilt, and the GFS remains positive to neutral tilt going off the east coast. With the NAO being negative it doesn't make sense to me (still novice) that the GFS would remain positive/neutral in this pattern. Any explanations or am I not seeing something?? To be honest I haven't really looked in detail to this particular setup so wont' even attempt a guess as to why there are differences. Generally though, and just my opinion, but I think sometimes too much is made of the teleconnections. They can and do make certain outcomes more or less likely. But when it comes to individual shortwaves embedded in an existing pattern I think it really comes down to the details (upper jet structure, diabatic effects, warm/cold advections, baroclinicity & instability, wave interactions, etc.) regardless of the teleconnections. I will say this though, the GFS does have a known progressive bias as reported by NCEP during its rollout with lifting/opening/scooting waves through the flow too quickly. Doesn't mean the GFS is entirely wrong, but something to consider. |
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Post by Snowstorm920 on Jan 4, 2021 11:11:37 GMT -6
Im trying to keep my expectations low because STL has been a snow hell recently but the pattern from the 11th onward looks absolutely loaded on the ensembles. NAO and AO are going in the cellar and the southern jet looks to be very active. The arctic hammer is also looming in the not so distant future How is the EPO looking? It looks to go neutral to slightly negative mid/late month. Still a big enough spread in the ensembles to know for sure |
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Post by Tilawn on Jan 4, 2021 11:53:54 GMT -6
I don’t ever remember there being a dense fog advisory until 3:00 of an afternoon.
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Post by Snowstorm920 on Jan 4, 2021 11:55:34 GMT -6
The 06z EPS actually trended further north and stronger with the system Thursday. Some big runs in there.
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Post by STGOutdoors on Jan 4, 2021 11:55:55 GMT -6
We have para gfs and gem on our side for the weekend storm. I still think wed. night thurs system had potential.
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Post by Snowstorm920 on Jan 4, 2021 12:02:11 GMT -6
We have para gfs and gem on our side for the weekend storm. I still think wed. night thurs system had potential. I could see the system this week trend back north for sure |
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Post by STGOutdoors on Jan 4, 2021 12:12:02 GMT -6
Euro is a hair north of last night’s run. Southern folks in play still for sure.
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Post by ndolan387 on Jan 4, 2021 12:23:37 GMT -6
I don’t ever remember there being a dense fog advisory until 3:00 of an afternoon. I agree, very rare |
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Post by Snowstorm920 on Jan 4, 2021 12:41:59 GMT -6
Talk about being missed to the south. Euro has a huge winter storm across Texas and Dixie Alley this weekend
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Post by ndolan387 on Jan 4, 2021 13:10:34 GMT -6
According to this morning's NAM sounding for 18z (~1 hr ago) it's around 6*C just ~75mb up into the air at ~925mb while it's around 1*C at the surface. The temp gradient isn't extreme, but the warm air is very close to the ground enough to do the job. Fog city. Never underestimate the power of low stratus right now.  |
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Post by jmg378s on Jan 4, 2021 13:19:26 GMT -6
Also calm winds prevents fog from dispersing or mixing out.
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Post by ndolan387 on Jan 4, 2021 13:30:57 GMT -6
Also calm winds prevents fog from dispersing or mixing out. Another good point! |
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Post by Snowman99 on Jan 4, 2021 14:35:45 GMT -6
This is going to be fantastic watching the deep south possibly getting storm after storm as everything gets suppressed and we sit up here commenting in a thanksgiving thread from the equally fantastic year of 2020.
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Post by STGOutdoors on Jan 4, 2021 14:40:07 GMT -6
The 18z nam clearly shows the well-defined boundary of the invisible anti-snow forcefield for the entire CWA late wed night into thurs. That’s comical.
In all seriousness, it’s better than it was at 12z but if it happens like that this board may self destruct.
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Post by landscaper on Jan 4, 2021 15:16:13 GMT -6
Unfortunately , it is what it is. You can’t change the weather , we live in an area that seems to get screwed year after year. About every 4-5 years we have a good season. It really stinks when you are a snow Contractor who has to buy thousands and thousands of dollars worth of chemicals with no guarantee it will snow. That’s what really stinks about this area. I’m kind of numb to it by now. We are almost half way through our snow season with no storm insight . January 15th it usually about the half way point.
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Post by bdgwx on Jan 4, 2021 15:37:31 GMT -6
I've been trying to objectively score our winters in terms of seasonal snowfall. This ended up being more challenging than I had anticipated. The main issue is that to provide a meaningful score you need a normal or log-normal distribution of data and seasonal snowfall is not natively distributed this way. The reason is somewhat confusing. Let me see if I can explain. Normal distributions are basically bell curves where the number of samples on the left is approximately matched with the number on the right and where the tails go on indefinitely just with lower and lower probabilities. It is the tail on the left side that is problematic because there is a constraint on the left hand side values...the fact that we can't get a negative amount of snow (though I'm sure Mother Nature will give it her best shot here eventually). The right side ends up being a little problematic due to the small sample size (60) and the fact that there are two pesky outliers. So what I did was bisect the population. And treat below average years differently than above average years. The median snowfall in St. Louis over the last 120 years is 17". This is where the bisect happens. For below average years I measure the coefficient of the distance between 0 and 17. For the above years I do the same exact it is from 17 to 50. More about why I choose 50 later. I then log scale this coefficient to produce a normalized index. I then z score that index to produce the final value. Lets jump back to the choice of 50 for the right hand side. The 67.6" in 1911 and 66.0" in 1977 are quite anomalous. This really messes with the distribution. So just like I treat 0" as a perfectly bad year I decided to treat 50" as a "perfectly" good year. Note the quotes around "perfectly" this time. My arbitrary choice means that we can have (and have had) better than "perfect" years. There is a statistical technique called Tukey's Biweight that is more robust and resilient with outliers, but it's really hard to do in Excel. Sorry, you all are just going to live with what I've done for now. Finally, I wanted to scale the z-scores so that I could provide meaningful textual descriptions for them so I just multiplied them by 2. Negative scores are "bad" while positive scores are "good".
< 4.00 : horrific
-4.00 to -3.00 : terrible
-3.00 to -2.00 : very bad
-2.00 to -1.00 : bad
-1.00 to 0.00 : meh - below average (down to ~11")
0.00 to 1.00 : meh - above average (up to ~23")
1.00 to 2.00 : good
2.00 to 3.00 : very good
3.00 to 4.00 : kaboom
> 4.00 : even snowman99 would approveAnd here is how the scores lay out.  Most of our years fall into the below/above average bins. We had 2 "horrific years" and 3 "even snowman99 would approve" years. Here are the top 10 bad years scored.
1. 1931 : 0.7" : -4.85
2. 1953 : 1.5" : -4.50
3. 2016 : 3.2" : -3.79
4. 1949 : 3.3" : -3.75
5. 1966 : 3.6" : -3.62
6. 1930 : 4.9" : -3.11
7. 1918 : 5.5" : -2.89
8. 1954 : 5.5" : -2.89
9. 1920 : 5.6" : -2.85
10. 1925 : 5.6" : -2.85
Here are the top 10 good years scored.
1. 1911 : 67.6" : +7.08
2. 1977 : 66.0" : +6.88
3. 1913 : 46.7" : +4.37
4. 1973 : 42.4" : +3.80
5. 1905 : 38.4" : +3.25
6. 2010 : 36.8" : +3.03
7. 1981 : 36.6" : +3.00
8. 1976 : 36.3" : +2.96
9. 1959 : 35.2" : +2.80
10. 1909 : 33.7" : +2.59
It is important to note that you turn these back into z-scores by dividing by 2. For example...the 7.08 downscales to a z-score of 3.5. This would normally have an implied probability of about 1-in-1000 if I hadn't bastardized the right side of the distribution. |
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Post by snowjunky on Jan 4, 2021 15:44:15 GMT -6
That Winter of 1911 was a beast. I remember it like it was yesterday.
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Post by jmg378s on Jan 4, 2021 15:51:38 GMT -6
Unfortunately , it is what it is. You can’t change the weather , we live in an area that seems to get screwed year after year. About every 4-5 years we have a good season. It really stinks when you are a snow Contractor who has to buy thousands and thousands of dollars worth of chemicals with no guarantee it will snow. That’s what really stinks about this area. I’m kind of numb to it by now. We are almost half way through our snow season with no storm insight . January 15th it usually about the half way point. I feel sorry for you guys. We can go from 30" one season to 2" the next and still average 16". It's definitely not same the level of problem like in a snowbelt going from 110" to 80" with an average of 95". Governments can more easily deal with this level of change but as individual contractors spending your own capital it's gotta be frustrating as @$!+. |
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Post by Snowman99 on Jan 4, 2021 15:55:40 GMT -6
I've been trying to objectively score our winters in terms of seasonal snowfall. This ended up being more challenging than I had anticipated. The main issue is that to provide a meaningful score you need a normal or log-normal distribution of data and seasonal snowfall is not natively distributed this way. The reason is somewhat confusing. Let me see if I can explain. Normal distributions are basically bell curves where the number of samples on the left is approximately matched with the number on the right and where the tails go on indefinitely just with lower and lower probabilities. It is the tail on the left side that is problematic because there is a constraint on the left hand side values...the fact that we can't get a negative amount of snow (though I'm sure Mother Nature will give it her best shot here eventually). The right side ends up being a little problematic due to the small sample size (60) and the fact that there are two pesky outliers. So what I did was bisect the population. And treat below average years differently than above average years. The median snowfall in St. Louis over the last 120 years is 17". This is where the bisect happens. For below average years I measure the coefficient of the distance between 0 and 17. For the above years I do the same exact it is from 17 to 50. More about why I choose 50 later. I then log scale this coefficient to produce a normalized index. I then z score that index to produce the final value. Lets jump back to the choice of 50 for the right hand side. The 67.6" in 1911 and 66.0" in 1977 are quite anomalous. This really messes with the distribution. So just like I treat 0" as a perfectly bad year I decided to treat 50" as a "perfectly" good year. Note the quotes around "perfectly" this time. My arbitrary choice means that we can have (and have had) better than "perfect" years. There is a statistical technique called Tukey's Biweight that is more robust and resilient with outliers, but it's really hard to do in Excel. Sorry, you all are just going to live with what I've done for now. Finally, I wanted to scale the z-scores so that I could provide meaningful textual descriptions for them so I just multiplied them by 2. Negative scores are "bad" while positive scores are "good".
< 4.00 : horrific
-4.00 to -3.00 : terrible
-3.00 to -2.00 : very bad
-2.00 to -1.00 : bad
-1.00 to 0.00 : meh - below average (down to ~11")
0.00 to 1.00 : meh - above average (up to ~23")
1.00 to 2.00 : good
2.00 to 3.00 : very good
3.00 to 4.00 : kaboom
> 4.00 : even snowman99 would approveAnd here is how the scores lay out. Most of our years fall into the below/above average bins. We had 2 "horrific years" and 3 "even snowman99 would approve" years. Here are the top 10 bad years scored.
1. 1931 : 0.7" : -4.85
2. 1953 : 1.5" : -4.50
3. 2016 : 3.2" : -3.79
4. 1949 : 3.3" : -3.75
5. 1966 : 3.6" : -3.62
6. 1930 : 4.9" : -3.11
7. 1918 : 5.5" : -2.89
8. 1954 : 5.5" : -2.89
9. 1920 : 5.6" : -2.85
10. 1925 : 5.6" : -2.85
Here are the top 10 good years scored.
1. 1911 : 67.6" : +7.08
2. 1977 : 66.0" : +6.88
3. 1913 : 46.7" : +4.37
4. 1973 : 42.4" : +3.80
5. 1905 : 38.4" : +3.25
6. 2010 : 36.8" : +3.03
7. 1981 : 36.6" : +3.00
8. 1976 : 36.3" : +2.96
9. 1959 : 35.2" : +2.80
10. 1909 : 33.7" : +2.59
It is important to note that you turn these back into z-scores by dividing by 2. For example...the 7.08 downscales to a z-score of 3.5. This would normally have an implied probability of about 1-in-1000 if I hadn't bastardized the right side of the distribution. I'm Snowmann 99 and I approve this message |
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snowcat
Junior Forecaster
Bowling Green, MO
Posts: 280 
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Post by snowcat on Jan 4, 2021 17:02:03 GMT -6
We had some light rain here in BG this afternoon, which started melting off some of our ice and snow. We've had an insane amount of limbs falling throughout the day, but fortunately none have hit our house or cars so far...every time I hear them fall, I get very nervous!I'm thinking we were lucky to have had a tree service out this past summer who did trim and remove a number of branches on some of our larger trees.
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