Chris's Corner - Welcome to 2021

NAM has decent snow squall parameters around here tomorrow. CAMs also have another round of light snow tonight

12z gfs says we wait until next weekend for anything meaningful to be on the radar.

So be it

Maybe a dusting here in the Harvester area. I think we dodged a bullet yesterday.

GFSv16 is certainly active with plenty of arctic air around in the medium to long range

00z euro had a bunch of cold air loaded in Canada ready to release down.

12z gem brings it down, just a bit west compared to the gfs.

It fits with the split PV and lag time to impacts on our sensible weather

yeah, we may be in a transition.  I'm actually surprised that our surface temps don't pop a little higher next week, but instead are pretty close to climatology.  That cold air doesn't really build in western canada until toward the middle or end of next week.  cpc has area in below normal temps in week 2, along with above normal precip, so hopefully we can get some watchers.  

Thanks Beaker hopefully it will show something by weekend.

Guess one of those winters not going to work for us.

The gfs and euro have both systems and are in pretty good agreement on timing and strength, but the gfs places the low further south and looks to be a colder solution in terms of ptype in MO. We still haven't built alot of cold air in Canada at this time, so I suspect the euro is the more likely winner on this one. Anyway this is probably getting too detailed this far out. I think what we know is some changes coming in the overall pattern last week in January, along with some kind of precipitation.

On this day in 1978, I was shoveling 15 inches of snow. From the Cape Rewound facebook page by Fred Lynch a long time photographer: A year before the Great Blizzard of 1979 with 24 inches of snow, Cape Girardeau recorded 15 inches of snow Jan. 15-16, 1978. It was compared to a record blizzard of 15 inches on Dec. 8, 1917. In January 1918, a total of 35.7 inches of snow was recorded.

This was part 2 of a series of 3 winters, where ice gorges formed on the MS River, and people got arrested walking on foot out into the river. Just when you didn't think you could top the previous winter, old man winter said, "hold my beer". The lead paragraph of the newspaper after the 1979 blizzard said to say no more about 1917/1918 - for the great blizzard of 1979 is the new yardstick. Those words are still true. St. Louis would get its super snow in 1982. I believe one of those winters in the late 70s, St. Louis got 66 inches of snow for the season. The snows those years were regional in nature. widespread. it didn't matter where you lived, if snow was coming it would find you. These days, the snows tend to be narrower bands of snow and it's rare that the entire region gets all snow. DAM and WAM took a hiatus. That was not the case in 77/78/79. Snow came at us from all directions - the northwest, the southwest, etc. Snow blanketed the entire state and stuck around. Snow on snow. I believe Time magazine put out a spread on a new ice age. My science teacher spoke about it then and said it was bogus - that the earth had actually warmed close to 1* C over the century and by the end of the century, we could be 2.5*C warmer than 1900. She said this was a big deal, but back then there wasn't the discussion on whether climate change was man made or not. It was more along the lines that climate is anything but constant. I would say she was very smart. Passed away a couple years ago, sadly.

For me, those winters couldn't have come at a better time in my life. Old enough to be free-ranged by my folks, but not too old to enjoy. We had a big hill behind my house, called Brookwood. All the neighborhood kids met there for sledding. On one December occasion (either 76 or 77), we had 4 inches of sleet. It sleeted the entire weekend. We didn't need any hill on that occasion to get going. Now, I got to admit, by 1979, I was still 15, but starting to get a little older with more interests - that's when we started our poker group, meeting in each others basements and gambling with all the loose change we could muster from our couches. It was a friendly poker group, no busted kneecaps or anything like that. Nonetheless, fond memories, that I wish my kids, even my grandkids could have enjoyed something similar. I've bought my share of sleds as an adult for my kids, that sat idle in the garage all winter after giving to the kids as a Christmas present. I would never recommend that these days. It's not fun looking at a sled all winter, and it's not unreasonable that a kid could outgrow that idle sled before a real snow came.

Each of those winters featured a huge snowstorm that paralyzed the region.  In 1977, it was an 11 inch blizzard; then the 15 inch supersnow; then the great blizzard of 1979.  The good thing too, those storms were not the only storms to impact the region.  There was plenty of winterstorms that affected the region those years otherwise.

It's always something this winter...so far.

I keep having to remind myself that we've seen several winters before where the first half was basically a non-winter and it turned on a dime and came in like hotcakes February into March. Nature has a way of balancing things out...the "rubberband theory".

The last week or so of this month into February should hold strong potential with the way things are playing out. Any warm spells between now and then should be short lived and not significantly above average. Models have pretty consistently been too warm overall in the medium range lately, especially during cloudy days. The wave(s) ejecting out of the SW near Baja next week will need to be watched closely...the GFS and GEM have a stronger ridge over the top and more cold air nearby. We'll have to see where the boundary ends up, and how much those waves can develop.

Some of the short term models are showing some minor accumulations for tonight and tomorrow..... I guess we shall see

It wouldn’t take much lol