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OT: 12/16/20 Snowstorm Thread: First Significant Winter Storm of the Season - Major Snow/Sleet/Rain

You wonder why many are skeptical of weather forecasts! Roll eyes. I also enjoy how doubling the forecast is considered accurate. 6 to 12 inches, 12 to 24 inches? Comical!
Good post!

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Got out this morning to clear a very dense 4-5 inches off the driveway after hearing what sounded like a hailstorm against the windows for a couple of hours last night. Wind was crazy, too, but thankfully only blew off a couple of small Christmas decorations (and thankfully not the big new wreath we put up this year). Had that been snow and not ice pellets, might have been more depth here at the foot of Sourland Mountain, but plenty enough for sledding for the kids this morning.
How close to the Sourlands do you live? We are only a few mins from the county preserve entrance. Amazing place!
 
Thanks once again for the models and updates, Numbers. I got less snow than was forecasted but it was reasonably close and I was prepared for what we got. I don’t expect the models to be perfectly correct.
Agreed. Like many snowstorms, this was clearly going to be impossible for anybody to get perfectly correct everywhere. It's still great that we can get a heads-up days in advance about worst-case (or for snow-lovers like me, best-case) scenarios.

Weather forecasting has improved a lot since I was a kid. Back then, the best we had was the town crier, who would, after checking in on the telegraph machine (when it was working), run through the streets of the town (uphill in all directions) and scream out that it was snowing down yonder and the wind was blowing our way. None of this inch-specific prediction stuff at all.
 
That's not accurate. The WAA between 700 and 800mb was surging up the coastal plain. The H7 circulation center was way out by Harrisburg when parts of NJ flipped to sleet.
I was curious, though, why the sleet line punched much further north in the early evening in E-PA/W-NJ (Bucks-Mercer-Hunterdon-Somerset than it did for Middlesex, SI and points east where it stayed snow until the dry slot hit around 9:30 pm. Obviously, it's mid-level warmth from the S/SW in that area and I thought the 700 mbar low went up the Delaware - was that the reason?
 
Actually ended up with more than I thought we would in the end. When it switched to sleet last night, I thought it was donezo. But I guess the pre-dawn switch to snow gave us a few inches more. I think we got about 10 inches here total (tough to tell for sure with all of the drifting).
 
Actually ended up with more than I thought we would in the end. When it switched to sleet last night, I thought it was donezo. But I guess the pre-dawn switch to snow gave us a few inches more. I think we got about 10 inches here total (tough to tell for sure with all of the drifting).
donde?
 
Every snowfall map since Tuesday morning has had your area of southern Somerset in their 8-12" band (all posted in this thread), so 5.5" is still a bust, but not a mammoth one. And the zone text product for Somerset from their 4 am Weds morning package is below and it says 10-14", but there are notoriously incomplete, which is why 99% of the world uses the snowfall map.

https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/total_forecast/getprod.php?afos=xxxzfpphi&wfo=phi&font=120&new=1&version=27

NJZ010-162100-
Somerset-
Including the city of Somerville
347 AM EST Wed Dec 16 2020

...WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT FROM NOON TODAY TO 10 AM EST
THURSDAY...

.TODAY...A slight chance of snow this morning, then snow this
afternoon. Snow accumulation of 1 to 3 inches. Highs in the lower
30s. Northeast winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph. Chance
of snow near 100 percent.
.TONIGHT...Snow. Isolated thunderstorms. Snow may be heavy at
times. Additional snow accumulation of 8 to 12 inches. Windy.
Near steady temperature in the upper 20s. Northeast winds 15 to
25 mph with gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.
.THURSDAY...Mostly cloudy with snow likely in the morning, then
partly sunny in the afternoon. Total snow accumulation of 10 to
14 inches possible. Brisk with highs in the lower 30s. North
winds 15 to 20 mph, diminishing to 5 to 10 mph in the afternoon.
Chance of snow 70 percent.

I dont care what the map showed..the warning statement said 12-20 inches. Its a miserably incorrect forecast by Mt Holly and the thing is that I without any degree knew that wasnt happening
 
Will the PA gov ban booze sales right before Christmas too? Imagine the triple FU of having so many snowed-in residents, ordered lock-downs and a no-booze order...hopefully they stocked up!
 
Here in Cherry Hill, we wound up with about 5.5 inches -- actually a little more than expected. (Our house is on the eastern edge of the I-95/295 corridor) I checked out flemington, where we have a house, and that was about 7 inches -- less than they were projected to get until the last minute. I would rather this storm had been all-snow (sleet and ice are hell to deal with, as all of you know), but I don't get to pick.
 
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I was curious, though, why the sleet line punched much further north in the early evening in E-PA/W-NJ (Bucks-Mercer-Hunterdon-Somerset than it did for Middlesex, SI and points east where it stayed snow until the dry slot hit around 9:30 pm. Obviously, it's mid-level warmth from the S/SW in that area and I thought the 700 mbar low went up the Delaware - was that the reason?
I will have to see if I can find an H7 archive from yesterday but I think that's on the right track ideawise. But I think the H7 low went even further west than the Delaware,so less waa aloft on the coast.
 
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Over 40 inches of snow fell in Binghamton, NY and surrounding areas from this storm

131348796_3703259833050909_8183499819732154851_n.jpg
That's what it looked like opening the door to my garage just before one of my annual Halloween parties back in the day.

It was an entirely different kind of snow. But the hookers still made snow angels in it.
 
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Will the PA gov ban booze sales right before Christmas too? Imagine the triple FU of having so many snowed-in residents, ordered lock-downs and a no-booze order...hopefully they stocked up!
I rarely drink at home, unless having a party or other kind of gathering. I have a couple annual parties at which, despite me asking people not to do so because I already have so much, people insist in bringing more beer, wine and liquor. I could drink steadily for months and not exhaust my supply. I actually threw out around six or eight cases of beer that was about a year old last February just to clear out some space in an unused room where I was storing it.
 
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I will have to see if I can find an H7 archive from yesterday but I think that's on the right track ideawise. But I think the H7 low went even further west than the Delaware,so less waa aloft on the coast.
@RU848789

Numbers I dunno how to host and post an image but if you look at todays nam on tidbits and go back through the reanalysis you'll see the H7 low at 1pm yesterday was over Pittsburgh, and by 7 was over Harrisburg.
 
The 16 in my driveway became 22 inches by 12:30 when it finally ended. Then my plow guy only did half the driveway???!

Lots of snowblower time this afternoon.

This is in southern New Hampshire.
 
We cleared a very heavy 9 inches off of the driveway back around 12:30. That was dense snowpack I'll tell ya.
 
I've just watched the Miami afternoon weather.They're complaining of the cold snap that will drop tomorrow morning's temperature down to a chilly 55.
 
Will the PA gov ban booze sales right before Christmas too? Imagine the triple FU of having so many snowed-in residents, ordered lock-downs and a no-booze order...hopefully they stocked up!
You couldn't buy hard liquor for the first 2 months is PA. Just beer and wine.
 
I got a foot in Summit. Just enough that my snowblower had a tough time with it. Got through most of it but had to do some by hand. Close to 100 ft long drive way is not fun.
 
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I got a foot in Summit. Just enough that my snowblower had a tough time with it. Got through most of it but had to do some by hand. Close to 100 ft long drive way is not fun.
Get a better snowblower...drop a hint to your significant other! 😉
 
I dont care what the map showed..the warning statement said 12-20 inches. Its a miserably incorrect forecast by Mt Holly and the thing is that I without any degree knew that wasnt happening
If you want to be obstinate and whine about the warning statement being wrong, when you know they either have to include all or none of the county in that group, have at it - a better complaint would be to split the county in half (same for Middlesex) so they can account for the differences which often occur in these counties, like they've done for several other counties in NJ. But you know well enough to know that the map is the primary source for snow forecasts, since the map has the ability to show the finer details and you were in the 8-12" swath.

I still don't know why you get so angry at foreasts that are off a bit, when getting every location right is essentially impossible, given the chaotic nature of numerical modeling and the uncertainty inherent in such forecasts. Back in the 70s and 80s we were lucky to get snowstorms even marginally correct, so the improvements since then are huge. In the big picture, the models were superb in sniffing out a major snowstorm for the entire northeast nearly a week in advance and the forecasts from a day or so before the event across the area were the usual mix of great for some, pretty good for others and pretty bad for some, which is almost inevitable, as per my breakdown in the earlier post,

Nobody was going to predict 30"+ for a huge swath of PA/NY/VT/NH accurately and it turned out that them getting so much snow "robbed" much of our area of some of the snow we were forecast to get (via subsidence). It turns out that much of the NWS 95 corridor forecast of 8-12" was pretty good for NB to NYC, but not nearly as good SW of there to Trenton and in SE PA and certainly the areas NW of you and me predicted to get 12-18" were all short of that by a few inches for most (but there are reports of over 12" in those locations, too). In hindsight a "better" forecast would've been 6-10" for the 95 corridor and 8-14" for the next tier to the NW. They were off a bit - it happens.
 
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I'd like to know what the experts here feel about this Philadelphia Inquirer article indicating that this storm makes it more likely we'll have another snow storm because of all the snow cover. I'm not sure I believe this because the temperatures will climb next week (especially in the Philly area), and so the cover should soon be gone. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the point. https://www.inquirer.com/weather/ph...lation-winter-weather-christmas-20201217.html
 
If you want to be obstinate and whine about the warning statement being wrong, when you know they either have to include all or none of the county in that group, have at it - a better complaint would be to split the county in half (same for Middlesex) so they can account for the differences which often occur in these counties, like they've done for several other counties in NJ. But you know well enough to know that the map is the primary source for snow forecasts, since the map has the ability to show the finer details and you were in the 8-12" swath.

I still don't know why you get so angry at foreasts that are off a bit, when getting every location right is essentially impossible, given the chaotic nature of numerical modeling and the uncertainty inherent in such forecasts. Back in the 70s and 80s we were lucky to get snowstorms even marginally correct, so the improvements since then are huge. In the big picture, the models were superb in sniffing out a major snowstorm for the entire northeast nearly a week in advance and the forecasts from a day or so before the event across the area were the usual mix of great for some, pretty good for others and pretty bad for some, which is almost inevitable, as per my breakdown in the earlier post,

Nobody was going to predict 30"+ for a huge swath of PA/NY/VT/NH accurately and it turned out that them getting so much snow "robbed" much of our area of some of the snow we were forecast to get (via subsidence). It turns out that much of the NWS 95 corridor forecast of 8-12" was pretty good for NB to NYC, but not nearly as good SW of there to Trenton and in SE PA and certainly the areas NW of you and me predicted to get 12-18" were all short of that by a few inches for most (but there are reports of over 12" in those locations, too). In hindsight a "better" forecast would've been 6-10" for the 95 corridor and 8-14" for the next tier to the NW. They were off a bit - it happens.
Give it up. Bac is right, it was a horrible forecast and major bust. Also, as I said before, WW nailed it again. Almost perfect forecast by them.
 
Give it up. Bac is right, it was a horrible forecast and major bust. Also, as I said before, WW nailed it again. Almost perfect forecast by them.

To me, a storm is a bust only when very little snow falls. That wasn't true (I've got six inches on the ground in Cherry Hill, which is more than was forecast.) I think most everyone understands that predicting exact amounts, or even ranges, is practically impossible except with a lucky guess.
 
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