Thursday, December 25, 2008

Consistency = Likely

When it comes to computer weather models consistency in a certain event is what meteorologists look for. A consistent trend is hard for the models to do but with this storm on January 3rd the models, on every run, are showing the same thing time and time again. And that's rare, especially for the GFS. By tomorrow night and Saturday morning the EURO will start to pick up on this storm at 168 hours out and it will be the ice breaker. If the EURO shows the same as the GFS and is consistent then I can safely say that chances are, on January 3rd, we may see a WHOPPER of a snow storm! Why is this?


18z GFS run:

















Interestingly, I see two possibilities here. The first one is a negative tilted trough with a storm that gets talked about in text books and remembered for years to come. When a storm gets caught up in a negative titled trough (Like Oct 28th of this year) amazing things happen. Or the second being the lack of cold air with this system and it's just rain maker. When the EURO model starts to forecast this storm (not for another day or two) , it will be the ice breaker, and then I will get a much better picture. Until then, I will be waiting anxiously till the 12z model tomorrow and the 00z model Saturday. It's like Christmas presents all over again, you never know what your gunna get! :)

NAO indices:









This is the North Atlantic Oscillation, and it is the largest influence on the weather here in the North East United States. When it's negative we get cold and storms, when it's positive we have warmth and sunny skies. So you can imagine that the last two winter were mostly positive, and they were! But you look at a year like 1996 which was mostly negative and the big picture comes to life. This image above is embeded directly from NOAA and updates daily on it's own so you can come back to this blog to see how it changes from day to day. The black represents the past, and the red is what forcasted. When it goes negative expect cold and snow this time of the year, and notice it's highly negative for our January 3rd storm... interesting stuff, let's see how it all holds up.

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