System likely to produce a layer cake from hell frozen over.
Dr. Ryan Maue of weather.us has been watching the development of forecasts for a new major winter storm that is likely to pound the U.S. East Coast and Northeast/New England States Friday and Saturday. He writes:
Tropical moisture feed ahead of developing major winter storm will provide huge rainfall atop any frozen ground in the Middle Atlantic and Northeast into Saturday. Bad!
“Bad” in this case may equate to blizzard like conditions with heavy rain over frozen ground and snow, making for a real mess. Just look at the amount of precipitable water ahead of the system:
Here is the precipitation amounts from 6Z to 12Z on Saturday. That translates to East Coast times from Friday night to Saturday morning:
As you can see, snow will follow behind the liquid precip as cold air advects in behind the front and low, this means a layered mess is likely, with frozen ground, then rain on that , which will refreeze, then snow on top of that. It’s like a layer cake from hell frozen over.
At least the timing avoids the Friday evening rush hour in major east coast cities. Let’s hope the system does not speed up.
Now that is how Glacial Ice Sheets are built, Layer upon layer, storm after storm
Oh sheet! Now you tell us.
Get all your snow sculptures finished by Friday evening. The rain will saturate your work, then when it freezes, you will have a durable and enduring work.
I have a big pile snow out front with a sign on it.
FREE SNOW
Sometimes you can not even give the stuff away.
Tough luck Al. You may just have to request some money back from the UN fraudsters. Oh but I guess you are one of them.
Tony, leave a sign saying “snow $10”. It’ll be gone in a few hours 🙂
Likewise,
Put up a sign that says “Highly Valuable.
Do Not Remove”.
Then your snow will be stolen.
Put it in a Fedex box and it will be swiped right off your porch!
Someone will likely steal the sign! > ; }
The trick is to put it in a Dairy Queen Cake box and leave it on top of the can on pick up day.
If your sign says “Free snow to good home’ someone is bound to remove it from your lawn.
Click the heels of your ruby slippers together and repeat :
Warmer is better
Warmer is better
Warmer is better
When you are done you can go out and start shoveling.
Tom, since you’re from Florida we will cut you a break on this one, but you can’t go out and shovel frozen layered snow, it’s just to heavy. If your lucky you have a Honda HSS1332AT, or maybe a small Kubota diesel with the front mounted shaft-drive blower. I prefer the Honda, it gets into all those spots that might be hard to, otherwise, deal with. And don’t forget your Yaktrax, a pair of googles and a good old Helly-Hansen SOGN.
I didn’t think they had anyone left in those areas that actually get outside and work like that.
Mark, I grew up in New England and am all too familiar with the layers of frozen precipitation. In my older age I do enjoy rubbing a little rock salt in their frozen wounds though.
In Iowa they call it winter lasagna snow<ice<snow<ice. Nasty stuff to drive on. After they plow you get a nice shiny layer just waiting to break through to the wonderful slickness below. That is if your tire doesn't get caught and spin you out of control first.
Mark my 1960 Gravely with a MA210 snow cannon makes short work of those nasty snow piles and yes you need goggles. 🙂 Don’t aim the output at anything you like.
Sounds more like they are going to need pick-axes.
For those of you too young to remember, in the winter of 1977-1978, there were three blizzards in a row in February. The first was mostly powder in Boston, and the second clobbered Ohio and gave Boston rain, which turned the snow banks on the sides of Boston’s roads to wet stuff that froze to iron, and made them obstacles when the really big blizzard hit Boston later in February. That third one stalled by Cape Cod and just dumped snow for a couple days, as Boston got high tide after high tide with storm surges. The city was shut down around a week. I lived up in Maine, which wasn’t hit so bad and where people were more used to heavy snow, but I did notice the grocery stores gradually got emptier and emptier, because trucks couldn’t make it north from the south. (Eventually the smarter truckers found a way around to the north, but crossing the Canadian border was easier back then).
A lot of men from New Hampshire made money driving their heavy equipment south to clear roads around Boston. They tell tales of plowing cars to the side when they blocked roads. (I heard one tale of a man who reported his small, white car stolen from a mall parking lot, and the vehicle was found in early April in the same parking lot, as a huge pile of plowed snow melted away.) The thing I heard over and over was what a pain the iron-hard snowbanks from the earlier blizzard were, especially when the winds were howling. Roads drifted in, between the old banks, and rather than snow being plowed aside the fresh snow was plowed up the old banks, and tumbled back down into roads behind the plows.
I speak this old history like a typical old geezer just in case history repeats itself, and you young whippersnappers are told it is “Unprecedented”.
I was a graduate student in Boston during the blizzard of 78. The snow was above the tops of the parking meters in many places and cars were completely buried, such that plowed snow banks often had cars in them. The national guard was out keeping people off the roads. People were cross-country skiing across the city. Only one burger place was open down by the harbor for a couple of days; it was a fun but serious slog to get there, have a burger and coffee, and slog home. When the city started back up and people were digging out their cars, people fought over the dug out spaces, blows were exchanged in some cases. I had a parking space inside the block at Kenmore Square. I would put chains on the car, back up onto the snow, 2 feet up, drive to the street and down onto the road, take off the chains, drive to work. I had to reverse the entire process at the end of the day. It was fun the way the car would just fall down into the parking space when I got home.
I was only five at the time, but I remember the blizzard of 78. Mostly I remember my dad climbing out the window so he could shovel the snow piled up in front of the door…
The UPSTAIRS window. ○¿●
Course, we lived at the time in a cottage on the east side (downwind) of a mile long lake. Got buried deeper then many. It was still a hell of a thing.
I shovel a little a lot, frequently. I have only an electric leafblower, but four well worn carefully selected snow shovels, and a 2500 square foot sloped driveway. I try to shovel at each two inch increment, but six inches will take three hours. It’s either that or an hour on my indoor trainer mousewheel, and shoveling is much more exciting.
I avoid – HATE – tire tracks in snow for the tight pressure ice they make.
Terrific. Just what we need. >:-P
Caleb: I was 12 then, for the storm of 78. That was the day I quit my paper route. The office told me I should have gone out and delivered my 80 papers. Screw that, I worked tirelessly every day getting up at 4:30 in the morning and walked the 4 mile paper route. I used a borrow carriage that I hid in the field behind our section 8 housing apartment.
It was awesome… I remember climbing up on the roof of the nearby stores and falling 20 feet down under the snow and had to dig my way out. It was fun, and scary…
Well OBVIOUSLY because the majority of this system’s precipitation is rain and not snow, it’s a clear indication of climate change . . . . . right?
If it makes the headlines it is.
Let me guess … this will move 2018 from the 2ND HOTTEST YEAR ON RECORD!!! … to the 3RD HOTTEST YEAR ON RECORD!!!! ?????
Actually not even that, because -10°C lower in mid-high latitudes means +20°C over the North Pole, so according to calculations we are above average right now, despite decadal record snowstorms over the US and Europe.
With the way Arctic temperatures are calculated, the rest of the world can freeze that anomaly temperature won’t go down.
I don’t think 2018 will finish in the top 5. 80+ latitude is currently about -15 C and trending downward towards the coldest time of year around the end of February.
But it is usually around -32C so only bone chillingly cold instead of mind numbingly cold
Alert, Nunavut (Canada) – the most northerly permanent settlement in the world @ur momisugly 82.5°N (pop. 62) is currently -31°C. Resolute, Nunavut @ur momisugly 74.7°N (pop. 162) is -27°C.
and yet…somehow just north of them the arctic is melting
Lat, I know your comment was “sarc factor 7”, but people need to be aware that the polar winter atmospheric surface temp warm anomalies are still below freezing. It is the warm arctic SSTs which currently cause increased lower tropospheric moisture and the resultant longwave backscattering which raises air temps at night.
It should also be brought to the public attention that temperatures during NH summers near the pole have not been above normal, even though an apparent lack of sufficient winter cryo-conditions fostering sea ice formation has occurred over recent decades.
Folks need to know that the Arctic won’t melt as long as the warm anomalies are still below freezing.
Waterloo (Lat 43 N) was -24.3 on Saturday morning, wind chill -41C. Beijing is a clear, brisk -10 with 50km winds.
Time for the alarmists to load up the BS cannons…Hot is cold, cold is hot.
This should not be a problem for the New Englanders who want to get out with their EVs or bikes. Go for it. Al Gore and HuffPo said so. It should not be a problem for their grid either with all that diversified green energy and regional climate agreement. sarc.
Looks like the AGW fanatics on the US east coast will be shoveling snow again, instead of their usual BS. Cool! Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch! As for the reason-minded east coast residents, it’s just winter weather and you are prepared to deal with it, naturally.
I am beginning to think that there may something in this: extreme events = global warming theme.
Think harder, then read up on the history of weather.
You’ll be surprised to know that there’s a lot of money behind that equation.
€x₮л€m€ €¥€₪₮$ = ៛£QB/.£ ₩Дин.ƒn₴
The hypothesis is that more CO2 leads to catastrophic heat. That’s it. All the nonsense about “global weirding”, “more extreme weather events”, even “colder winters” like they’re claiming for this one are as far from the AGW hypothesis as the AGW claims are from real science.
It’s a pagan religion when one believes their “scientific” theory explains any and all outcomes, i.e. non-falsifiable.
Mike,
I was raised in western Pennsylvania. It is a great place to be from.
I went to college there, then left in 1965 — haven’t spent over 10 days there since seeing the place in the rearview mirror. My mother’s family moved in when Ohio was considered part of the Northwest Territory, so she knew about the region, and made sure we kids knew.
The sort of nasty extreme weather events are one of the reasons I never looked back.
While growing up, we would often drive north into Warren and McKean Counties. The trips took us through a section of the Allegheny National Forest. An ice storm had wacked a section of the forest we drove through and as a young kid I was fascinated by the broken limbs and busted trees — best seen with no leaves and a bit of snow.
Excepting zero, a real number can never equal an imaginary number.
sounds complex.
March 15, 2017
New England’s Ski Industry Prepares For A Changing Climate
http://www.wbur.org/news/2017/03/15/ski-mountains-climate-change
If this storm happens to cause power outages which could have been avoided by providing adequate fuel supply to the grid generators, then there will be avoidable human deaths, as a result.
At what point do the Greens who have blockaded the needed upgrades to the power grid, place their own lives in forfeit?
When pressed about the consequences of their choices, they inevitably state their realization that implementation of their policies can and will cause people to die, but their fall back rationalization then becomes some variant of, “too many human beings exist”.
This is the normal weather pattern you should expect during a La Nina winter. Wake me up when we notice some of that change in climate.
All is quiet on the Western front.
Mudslides do make it difficult to hear…
Interesting to me are the temperature changes inland.
Consider the Cleveland Airport location (although it was widespread).
Last week (1st week of the year) was bitter cold. Now the NE Ohio forecast is for a jump up, then a rapid and serious cold spell.
58° F Thursday, then Sat., a high of 23° F .
Next few nights: Sat = 9° F ;
Sun. night = 5° F ;
Mon. night = 10° F .
Farther east the weather is expected to be double-nasty.
Not so seriously cold, however.
So far it is looking like a standard winter. Cold, quick January thaw, followed by more cold. Fun for all winter sports this year.
Interesting that local DC weathercasters are missing the “extreme” aspect of this new front – predicting mild rains and temps Friday and Saturday.
Looks bad. Was on business in Rochester a week after such a storm. Streets almost impassible from ice downed tree limbs. Distribution grid took a real beating. The transition from rain to snow means sleet. If it is slow, watch out.
Most model guidance continues to develop a major winter storm
which may impact our region. Some locations are likely to get
well over a foot of snow from this system, however there still
are significant differences among individual models and
ensembles which leaves uncertainty in the placement of the
heaviest snow. There also will be an area of mixed
precipitation. Stay tuned, and keep in mind that model runs are
likely to fluctuate concerning the track of the low and the
location of the heaviest snowfall
I’m across the lake from BUF in Canada and I don’t like “mixed” precipitation.
http://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=buf&product=AFD&format=CI&version=1&glossary=1&highlight=off
Climate crisis mode!
Gators reckon been there seen that done that so what’s the big fuss sharks, etc-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/techandscience/alligators-use-bizarre-–-and-creepy-–-ancient-ritual-to-survive-ncs-arctic-blast/ar-BBIbc13
I guess we’ll miss that frozen slap where i live, although the temperature is supposed to drop to 20F during the day on Friday, AFTER the 52F high on Thursday.
So that means, hit the grocery store and the hardware store on Thursday, get everything not already in pantry, including hand mixer and new toaster, popcorn, carrots, cheesecake, ice cream, English muffins, apples, lots of bacon, sausages, onion soup, croutons, chocolate, bird food, Boursin cheese, mushrooms, some good crusty bread, butter, eggs, milk, OJ, V-8, kielbasas, sweet Italian sausage, chicken, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Got it. Which movies do you guys want to watch?
“Got it. Which movies do you guys want to watch?”
Beer!
I know you have a lot of snowflakes in America but this is getting ridiculous.
A couple of those maps show Chicago moved into Northwest Indiana.
Would that it were so! (an annoyed Illinoisan).
I thought that was where Illinois businesses were moving anyway?
If we’re lucky, Washington, DC will get a repeat of the 1996 snowstorm that dumped a measly 13 to 17 inches on the city and shut it down so hard the echo reached me in Chicago. The WDC office of the company that i worked for had to shut down and everyone stayed home. They should have asked Chicago how to handle a little snow like that. Piece of cake.