BLI snowman

3 minutes ago, Doinko said:

Really dumping snow now

Been trying to switch here but it seems to mostly be a westside thing for now. South wind has been keeping us at 36 here even with decent precip rates.

4pm temp of 34 on Monday at Eugene on the Euro. Not bad for March!

8 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

According to a lot of people cold without snow is no good.  All I said was the winter was not that special and it wasn't.

The 1974 airmass was legit though. 8 subfreezing highs and 6 straight lows in the single digits here. The lack of snow involved a fair amount of bad luck. Las Vegas ended up with over a foot of snow from that. You replay that blocking pattern 100 times and we probably come away from it snowier 99 times.

In the grand scheme of things most all of our winters just come down to 1-2 week windows of opportunity like that anyways. So if the separation between the good and the bad is just whether the mesoscale details like snowfall work out, then assessing  a winter's performance becomes a pretty subjective analysis. 

Just now, SilverFallsAndrew said:

Interesting... GFS briefly raises snow levels to about 2000' here tomorrow afternoon. 

Catastrophic developments.

2 minutes ago, MossMan said:

North. 

East.

I'm afraid this is Phillip's storm. He'll be on next week to tell us he told us so. 

Looks like maybe just enough northern stream energy kicks in on Monday into Tuesday that it could be interesting, with the energy suppressed enough to knock the onshore flow down a notch. Precip will probably be sparse but I think that's our best bet now in the lowlands for accumulations. Weekend just looks a couple degrees too warm below 500'. 

1 hour ago, Deweydog said:

The equinox STORM was deceptively benign looking in the big picture.

The absolutely bonkers ridge in the Midwest that month probably gave us an assist in stalling those fronts out so perfectly.

edit: I see Andrew and I share a brain!

11 minutes ago, DeepFriedEgg said:

Wasn't that an ana front situation, not intermittent showers and occasional weak systems making landfall?

There was a setup on Leap Day into the 1st in 2012 that was pretty similar to this weekend, with a meso-low that produced some 1-2" totals overnight around the Portland area from training bands of showers. 

But yeah the big boys in March 2012 were the anafronts. The first one hit the OR coast the hardest on the 12th and then the second one hit the Willamette Valley on the 21st. Those isothermal heavy precip situations are very different, obviously. 

9 minutes ago, SilverFallsAndrew said:

How’d you do last March?

Had 5 or 6 different days with snow in the air but only about 0.3" total accumulation.

Expect this stretch will be similar.

1 minute ago, SilverFallsAndrew said:

Should be a solid period coming up. I’d be shocked if many places below 500’ see snow. 

Yeah, nothing really revving my engine. Gonna be tough to get below 34 with any of the precip coming up. Just too marginal an airmass. 

7 minutes ago, Slushy Inch said:

Nice that wrf gfs and gfs is not by itself!

Kinda think at this point that you gotta throw out anything that shows only 19" in Newport.

2 minutes ago, SilverFallsAndrew said:

Oh… okay…

And yet I don't think I see a single instance where PDX hits 32 for the whole week!

3 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

I have to say the lowlands couldn't have done much worse collectively with the current trough than we did.  Hopefully later this week will be better.

Seems like this trough went about as expected. A decent 2-4" snowfall in the convergence zone and not much else. Screaming onshore flow + limited precip isn't a great combination and this never looked like much more than that.

We will likely be running into the same problem to varying degrees with the next round.

1 hour ago, Doinko said:

Yeah, I don't remember having much strong south wind these past few years.

We've had some big east wind storms though. 12/22/22 brought some power outages here and 1/13/24 was extremely intense, strongest east wind I've seen here, I'm surprised we kept power. There's a house nearby that unfortunately got crushed by a big tree during that.

Interestingly, the last east wind that really ripped up here in my corner of Clark County was 9/7/2020. That was full mountain wave and probably hit 40mph even here, so you knew it was gonna be bad everywhere else...

59 minutes ago, SilverFallsAndrew said:

That March 2012 anafront DUMPED accumulating snow across the mid valley during the middle of the afternoon. That was three weeks later too. 

That front stalled so hard it actually went backwards and gave NW OR and SW WA a decent snowfall the next night.

1 hour ago, Front Ranger said:

Meteorological spring is basically here.

Yeah, big severe weather outbreaks further north aren't unheard of by the end of February. 2012 and 2017 were similar.

3 minutes ago, Sunriver Snow Zone said:

Good for them! If it isn't cold or snowy, what's the point of suffering in 40-60 degree weather. Might as well embrace the warmth! It's not like they have Glaciers to worry about.

Looks like a decent chance for some supercells/tornadoes in the region this evening.

Most folks probably prefer to take their winter warmth without a side of baseballs and mobile home debris raining down. 

4 minutes ago, ShawniganLake said:

Outside of that week in January it’s been a pretty big snooze fest of a winter.  Cloudy, mild and occasionally damp.  The only 2 events that stick out in my mind are the January event and the wacky October snowstorm here. 

Looking like yet another winter without a significant south wind event here. 

They seem to fully be a thing of the past at this point. 

73 in Chicago right now after a low of 55. 

Typical winter!!

5 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

The chances are decent.  We're really due for a decent March snow event.

Unfortunately this looks like a pretty different evolution from 1989 or 1960. 

A lot of close but no snow-gar on the Euro for most of us. Persistent 500-1000' snow levels. Similar to that stretch at this same time last year following the arctic airmass.

I'd expect some spotty accumulations to continue in the lowlands but the high end potential requires much deeper offshore flow than what we're getting here.

On 2/25/2024 at 6:38 AM, hawkstwelve said:

That number is consistent with the same percentages in Iowa and New Hampshire that said they will not vote for him. See my post above to roadtonowhere.

He claimed last night "the Republican Party has never been more united" but that could not be further from the truth. The problem for Trump is both his support and his detractors are all but baked in at this point. It's going to be an incredibly long, tough road ahead to try and convince Republicans like me (and the other 20-40% of the Party who thinks like me) to vote for him come November. If he's not successful, hell maybe even if he is, Joe Biden wins.

Trump won IA by more in 2020 than he did in 2016, and lost NH by more in 2020 than he did in 2016.

So from an electoral standpoint, I'm not sure that it matters as we become increasingly polarized and partisan as a nation, especially with these two retread candidates. IA is safely a Republican stronghold just as NH is safely a Democratic stronghold. The true battleground states are shifting somewhat (WI/AZ) and becoming fewer and further between.

2 minutes ago, RaleighHillsRunner said:

You should totally be excited at 4,000ft; mountains and foothills are gonna score big time!  

This upcoming pattern seems to be cold mixed showers at best for us PDX lowlanders; when Mark takes off the snow tires I generally start looking toward Spring  

I forget if Mark still had his snow tires on in April 2022? He must have.

1 hour ago, Cascadia_Wx said:

I haven’t been watching Saturday too closely. Is that the anafrontal type setup?

That's more Thursday, but it's looking a little too progressive to give us an isothermal situation down to the valley floor. Andrew may see some blessings still.

Friday-Sunday has the ULL swinging around the region and looks ripe for a little more organized shower activity and maybe some deformation zone action. Anything occurring between 6pm-10am on those days stands a good chance of bringing accumulations. 

5 minutes ago, Deweydog said:

Last chance! Heading out in about an hour but I do need to make one stop you probably wouldn’t like.

Shooting range!?

Some lightning out in the Gresham area right now apparently.