Wednesday, December 12, 2012

May your days be merry and bright

And may all...

My December portion of the outlook has been an epic fail as we are running VERY high departures so far and still have some days of above normal before a colder snap.

Social media has made the local TV meteorologist job hard-- because of Twitter, Blog and FB people have access to comments from many source and some (like me) even read the models themselves. With that, some of the model data yesterday seemed to indicate a SHOT at some snow next week. My take was I thought it was bad run of the model and didn't comment. Seems like I was right--(as of now :)

With that, a colder pattern is creeping in. We'll have a few waves of storms between now and the end of next week. Snow WELL up into New England will be common along with some sleet and freezing rain. Boring stuff to your average person down here in Lynchburg, VA

The problem with our pattern has been that while we've had decent blocking in the Arctic and heading that was with a -NAO, the pacific has been a mess with a trough over the west coast (leads to ridging over the SE USA and remember Trough== cooler, ridge== warmer. Also, some of the higher lattitude blocking signals we monitor called the EPO has been positive, which doesn't allow what is called cross polar flow (AKA- getting the coldest air to our side of the globe. It's been pretty cold over Europe)

Those signals look to be getting better and with a pulse in the SOI-- which is a scale that measures pressure differences between Darwin and Tahiti, it also seems to be linked with "energy" in the sub tropical jet. There is about a 2 week lag time from a pulse to an event, so crude math says between December 24-27th or so is a decent time to think SOME colder air could be local and SOME type of storm cold be in our area. This is conjecture and by no means a forecast, but we are keeping our eyes on this time frame.

Also, mid week system next week COULD drop some Mt snows on the back sides, so if you have a cabin at 2500 feet get ready! Updates will be more fequent as the weather is getting a little more interesting.

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