Shift to colder, wetter weather won’t come quickly
It’s not quite a week into December, but some snow fans in Southwest Virginia are getting impatient because of the lack of cold weather, Thursday’s 40s highs and 20s/30s lows (47/31 at Roanoke, 46/22 at Blacksburg) only being a tease before a return to warmer than normal temperatures (60s highs, again) through the weekend. Maybe that’s because the Dec. 5-7 period has often produced a significant snow in recent years in all or part of our region — 2002, 2003, 2009 and 2010 coming immediately to mind. And many folks are wanting some wetness of any kind, with drought continuing to grow and worsen. There are a few showers popping up early on this Thursday evening from a weak disturbance and some growing moisture on southerly wind flow aloft, but not enough to settle the dust.
Neither of these issues are going to change with the flip of a switch. We often talk about pattern changes in the atmosphere as if they happen all at once. Sometimes, they do change quickly, but more often, it’s more of a pattern evolution that can take many days and even weeks. Over the next week or two we are going to see pieces of the Arctic air mass over Canada interact with the milder air that has built into much of the U.S. around the flow of the recurring Pacific Northwest low-pressure system. Low-pressure systems will develop along the boundaries of the contrasting air masses, and circulation around those systems will help swing cold fronts through. The first of these looks to occur 
about Monday or Tuesday, with a heightened chance of showers (and maybe even some thunderstorms, as mild as it will be ahead of the front) followed by a shot of at least seasonably cold air for a few days (sort of like Wednesday). There will probably be some snow showers behind the front as cold northwest winds blow up the Appalachians western slopes, but no organized winter storm appears to be in the offing. There may be two or three more similar storms in the next 2 weeks, each one dragging down some colder air and ever so slowly eating into the mild weather pattern we’ve been experiencing, one that will keep springing back to life between the fronts until there aremore large-scale changes, such as that Pacific Northwest low not redeveloping and being replaced with high pressure. These storm systems will each bring a chance of rain, and perhaps will eventually dig into the Gulf of Mexico for more significant, widespread rain than we’ve seen in while a time or two within the next couple of weeks. The Climate Prediction Center is tilting us toward wetter than normal in the 8-to-14-day period — but keeping us in warmer than normal as well, despite the quick, sharp shots of cold behind fronts. But for those wanting more winterlike weather, or at least wanting halfway decent rain, this slow storm-by-storm process is what it will take to change the atmosphere to become at least a little more conducive to what you want. For those who enjoy springlike weather — this will be another good weekend for you.
December 6, 2012 - 6:49 PM
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Here is where in the world the snow is falling:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/baltic-blizzard-disrupts-travel-across-sweden-cold-strengthens-across-europe/2012/12/06/50b0ad5a-3fb5-11e2-bca3-aadc9b7e29c5_blog.html#pagebreak
And here is the 16-day GFS snow cover projection, by Dec. 22. Yes, it shows some on us — likely fantasy, but you never know.
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/276837013406224384/photo/1
Looking at pockets of lite rain on radar in SWVA.
Likely all virga..
Small aircraft reports light to moderate rime ice at 15000ft..
Ice is out there…if you’re up for a cold balloon ride.
Bluefield has the strongest return
and they are 1400ft overcast 10 miles vis…no precip making the surface.
From the previous thread, wdbrand and I are having something of a debate on the new snow meter, and whether I have it easy or hard with the “win-loss” record I have set up to track my progress. Here is my initial entry on the snow meter: http://blogs.roanoke.com/weatherjournal/2012/12/debuting-the-weather-journal-snow-meter-week-ahead-likely-snowless/
Here is our debate from the previous thread:
WD: Mr. Myatt, you are far too lenient with your self set rules for your snow meter. You have a 50/50 chance of winning the entire season. 100%. You need to reset the difference between win and lose. If you need help, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll give you a snow meter that will let you work for your prediction.
ME: Disagree totally, WD. I’ve made this HARDER for myself with this up or down/ win-loss thing. I expect to do no better than about two-thirds and would be very happy with three quarters, unless the winter is uniformly warm like last year and therefore easy. Typically, there are too many late-week potential systems that I’ll have to gamble on one way or the other from several days out, too many sneaky disturbances/clippers/upslope snow events that can pop up that won’t be clear the previous weekend. A heavier snow squall goes into Blacksburg for just an hour when I have 3 or 4 snowflakes, dumps an inch, and I’ve blown the week. If we get into a winter like 2010-11 with frequent small disturbances, many of which miss, I could easily go sub-.500. I actually made it HARDER for myself by making a 5/10 call that doesn’t happen a LOSS, instead of a tie or half win/half loss. There is NO advantage for me sitting on a fence at 5 flakes — when I call 5 flakes, it will just be showing a very low confidence in a potential event, but I will lose nonetheless if it doesn’t happen.
I could have made this easy on myself with partial victories/losses for in-between snowflake numbers. But this is all or nothing each week.
WD: I’m also sure, most of the folks on this board are too polite to point out a stacked deck. However, I’m not one of them. Ain’t a bookie in Vegas that would take the bet if you were givin 10 to 1.
ME: Deck is stacked against me, WD, when on one Sunday have to make a call on a system the following Sunday. I might get a few gimmes here or there with a Monday storm that looks to be a pretty sure hit.
I am quite certain I would NOT have gone 5/10 or higher on the Dec. 18-19, 2009 storm the previous weekend. Would have settled for 3/10-4/10 or so. And I would have LOST on an 18-inch snowstorm!
**************
What thinks everyone else?
Yep, Joe, that low-level dry air is eating it up
With 20s dew points and upper 30s/low 40s temperatures, would certainly not be out of question for snow/sleet to make it to surface, if ANYTHING does.
Joe and Kevin,
Just have been outside and it is sprinkling here! Temps are currently 37 in the back yard. Radar looks like there are some spotty showers heading this way.
Whatever you do…refine the rules
before the first snow..or the squalls you’ll
be hearing wont be from the snow and wind.
Back from the sky.
Flew over top that stuff Joe was commenting on above. Not much there except some icing below about FL180 (18000′) but a smooth ride.
WD & Kevin…would it help if Snowmen were used instead? I say let Kevin have his fun!
Dinner time then time to update website.
Sorry WD I have to go with Kevin on the snow meter. Predicting snow for this region is always difficult and few ever get it right. Kevin has set this up so that he is making his calls on Mondays for the entire week. He will likely get burned with the late week systems as no one predicts snow in this area with any certainty more than 72 hours out. Also, Kevin’s snow meter is an all win or all lose. There is no in between. Yes, he will get a few right, but getting a majority right will be difficult. However, lets trash everything I just said and enjoy the snow meter as something fun and interesting. It really doesn’t matter which way the meter is “stacked.” Enjoy it for what it is, a bit of winter fun.
Sorta off topic, but will there be any way in the future to add local PWS (Personal Weather Stations) say from a site like Weather Underground to the side bar along with other blog information/websites?
Ben: I don’t know. Won’t be on the frontburner because of larger scale changes in Roanoke.com. It’s possible though. Thanks for the suggestion. That might be of some interest.
WD & Kevin: I completely agree with Leo Lady’s comment above and WD I’m not the polite type – I call’em like I see ‘em. I just hope we’re not eating “donut holes” this winter! Kevin has way to many factors to take into account to be called out for stacking the deck.
I think it just comes down to what kind of winter we have. If there are lots of warm weeks when it obviously won’t snow, or we get obvious early-week snow setups, I think I’ll rock the record on the snow meter. If we get lots of iffy systems Wednesday-Sunday, weak events that could be .9 or 1.1 inches, oddball setups, etc., I could have a weak enough record that I would be fired if I were a football coach.
The main objective is to add something weather-related and fun to another day of the newspaper that’s different than the regular Weather Journal column.
Ben…Id love to see that..
I would like to see people being able
to buy some reasonably priced weather stations
that attach to pc-s. That would be a big help in a lot
of rural and remote places in forecasting surface weather.
I will not weigh-in on the WD/KM discussion but I still maintain that if KM does not put those flakes in the freezer this weekend, they will be puddles. And Doug, on your earlier post you asked about me wanting colder weather. I guess my hope for colder air is the first element to get snow. Then us snow lovers will hope for moisture. Also, I am hoping the extreme cold will reduce our bug population since the brown bats are dying off.
One more comment. If you are unaware, from VA northward a fungus is killing the brown bat population. There is an old store building here in the Chapel that my aunt and uncle used to live in and ran a store. It has always had bats in the attic since built. There are now no bats. They always left for the caves in the winter but there were 0 bats in there this summer.
These snowflakes are ink and paper and inside computer chips. They’ll survive!
Currently 35 here on the ridge and light rain. A raw night to be outside.
Steady rain for a couple of hours in Woodlawn…havnt checked the gauge,but I’m sure it is the most we’ve gotten in a while…temp still at 37 degrees.
Kevin, if this winter goes like last, those ink/paper snowflakes in the computer chips may be all we have to look at. Guess we will take what we can get. I put my wife’s artificial Christmas tree up tonight. It is covered with snow and sheds terribly in the house when putting it up. That may be my White Christmas after all.
I’m with Kevin. Deck stacked against him. Late week storms. HARD to forecast. What looks like 5″ of snow here EASILY can turn into .5″ of freezing rain. Squalls in the NRV too. Don’t really see how else he could make it!
I think you should go with the snow meter as you have it defined for this winter and see what happens. If it ends up not working the way you expected then you could look at something more along the lines of what WD wants next winter which is probably ranges with different criteria for verification based on the number of flakes picked.
Sorry, Kevin, I admire your skills extremely, as well as your wonderful patient personality, but I gotta go more with wd’s point of view than yours. I will pick less than 5 snowflakes for the rest of winter right now, and give myself credit for this week, and I think the odds are extremely good that I will bat way over .500 for Roanoke. Blacksburg is trickier. I assume that you are going to have different scorecards for the two cities. If you give less than 5 snowflakes for both cities, and only Blacksburg gets 1 inch or more, that would be a win for Roanoke but a loss for Blacksburg, right?? Or if you picked 4 or fewer snowflakes for Roanoke but 6+ for Blacksburg, and only Hokieburg got the inch, that would be a win for each city. Do I have it right?
And thanks for your replies, Michael H. I understand where you are coming from.
Kevin has commented here more than once that very few of us like a winter like 2010-11 was, at least for those of us in the Roanoke valley and locations equally or less snowy that winter. Very cold (at least through early February) but well under average snowfall. The snow lovers were overall very disappointed, while the snow haters were grateful in a way, but I still had to deal with a large number of very cold and chilly days. I think Raonoke’s biggest one-day snow event that winter was about 3 inches. This winter may end up being another one like that one, despite the extremely warm start.
And Michael, thanks for informing us about the lack of bats. That sounds a bit like the balance of nature has been changed down your way, in a negative way. I have seen a zillion stories/documentaries about how the balance of nature has REALLY been changed radically in an almost disastrous way down in the Everglades. Ballistic growth in the number of pythons down there, and lots and lots of very large ones, too. In a way it is weather-related, too, according to one fascinating documentary I saw.
There are different won-loss records for each location.
I don’t plan to game the system like that, Doug. If I see there is a legitimate threat of snow and think there is at least a 50 percent chance Roanoke will get an inch, I’ll pull the trigger on it.
You would have been way sub-.500 in 2002-03 with that strategy. I think I would have gone sub-.500 in 2010-11 for all the busted storms and near misses we had.
Hey, joe, I think my yard had some sort of borderline rain/virga come through this evening. Everything was completely dry when I walked Blondie at 6:30, but I took him out at 10:20 and even though the driveway, street, and walkway were all completely dry, there were itzy beads of water on the grass and a long-leafed plant near our garage. Really strange. This makes two virga events here in the past 40 hours.
Yes, I agree about 2002-03, but how would my record be for the past ten years for Roanoke overall? I bet I would have been well over .500 for at least 7 of them. And if I was doing it week-by-week, I would have the benefit of going for 6+ snowflakes for a week when a Monday or Tuesday (or even Wed. A.M.) was very high probability.
And I don’t understand your comment about “… game the system ….” If you thought that it was likely that Blacksburg would get an inch but not Roanoke, you should predict accordingly. I hope that was not what you were referring to as possibly “gaming the system.”
I’m not going to intentionally pick below-5 for a whole season just to meet a statistical probability of being right more often than not. That’s what I meant by “gaming the system.” Maybe not quite the correct term, but my point is, I’m going to do my best each week to give the level of confidence in snow that I think is closest to correct, and not worry too much about protecting my record.
Yea Doug,,,looks like it was quite dry below 10000ft..
There were a few reports of aircraft in precip (icing)
from 8000-15000ft…
Radar tonight is all but drying up in the entire region..
Great for air travel and scheduled operations..but
we need some drought relief.
This system isnt much of a rainmaker anyhere.
Heaviest returns on radar now in central Ill..Quincy and Springfield
..neither getting anything more than light rain.
Mostly, it’s just a fun way of tracking how the snow meter is doing, very generally. I expect to go about 10-5 at each site. Think I could have done better last year with the constant warmness and many weeks of no snow potential at all, but might have been lucky to break .500 in the winter before that. I probably would have blown at least 2 of the 3 big snows in 2009-10, seeing as they came late in the week when they were far from a sure thing on the previous weekend, and I wouldn’t have wanted to go big on the flakes. It’s all for fun, not that serious.
Just noting the showers drying up on radar around here, Joe. Barely missed a light freezing rain event at some locations, with mid-upper 30s temps.
“A day that will live in infamy”.
We got a 45% boost in our rain for the past couple of weeks…picking up 0.05″ of light rain and drizzle.
So what is the holiday parade weather forecast for Hokieburg tonight/ It starts at 7 PM. For days the forecast said no rain. Yesterday said no rain so I left something out to get aired out and of course it got rained on it. Now I am seeing 20% growing to 60% through the weekend. What changed? Like I should trust any forecast in this area from any source…except maybe for KM. This is our two flakes – just thawed, right?
HokieTrax: We have some moisture return with southerly wind flow, and some weak disturbances glancing by to our west. That is why you see a thin chance of showers in the forecast tonight and over the weekend. Don’t think it’ll be a big deal tonight. The bigger chance of rain doesn’t arrive until Monday ahead of the cold front. Weekend still will be mostly dry and definitely mild.
Thanks, WD, for reminding us what is really important about today.
I was more or less pullin your chain over your snow meter thing, but still see where improvement could be made. However, your track record speaks for itself since I’ve been on the blog. You don’t need any gadgets to verify your forecasting and I am critical of most forecasting services, as you know.
All in good fun, WD!
Local paper here in DFW say watch for
dusting of white Monday morning.
I have serious doubts…Ground is gonna
be quite toasty anyway and im not waking
up early like a 6th grader dreading school
and peeking outside at daybreak either.
However it will be part of the same system coming
out of the Rockies with its trunk packed with cold air
that will come visit SWVA next midweek..
…”I
“Im dreaming of a bussssssted forecast..
just like the one before the last..
where the roads are shiny
the children whiney..
and mom says get on that bus, I mean fast.”
I remember that the first part of December ’09 was rather dry and mild…just saying. I wouldn’t get too depressed about the lack of winter weather just yet.
Website updated!
http://www.quagmireweathercentral.webs.com
I have an update on the home and blog pages. Will have another update after 4 PM.
BTW…
Kevin…get your Snowmeter ready for around Christmas specifically the 20-23 & 26-28.
Elebaty twelve raindrops here.
I’m not hoping for a pattern change to colder weather. I am hoping for a pattern change to wetter weather. We need to start getting regular, significant precipitation. I won’t complain if some of it happens to fall as snow. If we start getting storm systems that tap into Gulf of Mexico moisture, eventually the cold air will be in place for snow (or sleet or freezing rain, unfortunately).
Joe: That’s the thing I was thinking of especially in those borderline events where one can see surface temperatures from different locations and elevations. Weather Underground already has a nice link to see some PWS from around the area: http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/
I just finished getting my two weather stations connected to Weather Underground and CWOP. Now I just need some half way interesting weather instead of light winds!
Quagmire: I think the snow meter will get more challenging as we approach Christmas.
Comment 41, from the “joe-ster” in Dallas. He’s a poet and he knows it! Excellent little limerick, joe. Did you make it up, or is it one you heard previously? Obvious take-off of the tune White Christmas. I could almost hear the Bingster crooning it out …. in heaven. Thanks for bringing a smile to my face.
Personally I like limericks that are a bit more ….. er, ….. “racy.” There is one that starts off “There once was a man from Nantucket …..” Alltime classic.
Kevin…you want to know what I think…when the PNA and the NAO arrive simultaneously around the Mayan calendar to be negative for 12-21-12, Mayan predicted “end of the world, we will be partly cloudy with a chance of meatballs….hahahahaha….and all will be well with the world! That was a kid’s movie I just saw yesterday from a several years ago and had to work that in somehow into your blog! Seriously, want to thank all the veterans in this DAY OF INFAMY that did everything to protect our country from the past to current! Now how about some Christmas snow folks?
Hey, Quags, if there is something afoot for the December 20-23 timeframe, that would be a Thursday-Sunday segment. Excellent challenge for the Weather Wizard that would be (Yoda whispered that phrasing in my ear).
Not that I believed it at all anyway, but the Mayan calendar ending 12/21/12 has been debunked.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/05/safe-new-mayan-calendar-discovered-doesnt-end-2012/52191/
Better chance of meatballs falling from the sky.
Mr. Griggs, you are a dirty ole man!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 55* was the best I could manage today. Hardly saw a peep of sun. However, I did get the drive belt back on my mower that goes to the hydrostatic transmission. Back in the wood haulin business.
No Doug,,,
I make up most of my lines..this was
spur of the moment stuff..with of course
from the eyes of my childhood..(I ALWAYS wanted snow)
But thanks..
Ben: I think this sort of network might help VDOT
immensely. They could pinpoint as cold air filtered into an area
which roads need to be monitored and treated first.
They do a good job now..but It seems a lot of man hours are wasted
by people waiting for something to happen.
They could get the trucks (read sand in last nights close call)
closer to when and where its needed faster.
It might be a good idea to have test pads of asphalt with temperature sensors imbedded in them. Just brainstorming.
Scattered Tacos overnight becoming
mixed with and changing over to all
meatballs toward dawn. At times heavy
with red sauce. Cafeteria closings
will be announced on the Weather Channel/Food Network.
To wd: ABSOLUTELY! :>) :>) If anyone wants to hear three of the most hilarious but definitely “not-for-children” limericks, get in touch with Kevin and ask him to contact me. You must give him permission to divulge your e-mail address to me.
Dirty Ol’ Man aka Griggs….lol!
Yes, per the GFS & now Euro is beginning to show a trend towards something brewing around the 21st to 23rd…Actually there are at least 3 chances of something trying to rear its ugly head for the 19th, 23rd, 27th and possibly New Years Eve. An excellent challenge it would be, yes….
Since you mentioned Yoda, here’s a diddy for ya. Master Yoda
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_tYQRP4QWM
You can send me the 3 limericks to my email either via KM or at the quags website.
I am working in Germany with the weather and the improvement of weather forecasts. I read with excitement this weather. How accurate are the forecasts for the weather?