Here's a quote from a friend of mine who was a met at the NWS in New Mexico for 30+ years with regard to the modeling failures we've seen over the last 36 hours. I can't comment on the thoughts from his friend in Canada, but damn, the models really were bad the last 2 days and even the last 12 hours!
I mean in the big picture they certainly got the storm "right" with regard to the overall evolution over the last 5-6 days, but seeing 100 mile shifts north 3 days ago making it look like mostly rain for 95 and then a 200 mile shift south over the last 2 days bringing the snow to 95 and the coast - and then finally, predicting far less snow NW of 95 last night, dropping forecast amounts for that area and now seeing the Lehigh Valley, Poconos, NWNJ and the Hudson Valley outperforming everyone on this storm was pretty bad.
"Been years since I’ve seen the models perform so poorly…especially in the east. One of my coworkers was a modeler in Environment Canada. We were talking how ******* the performance has been with this system.
He thought it was because the upper wave went across the Rockies where drag slowed it down and weakened the system. A combination of fewer inputs into the models that far west and the diffuse nature of the upper system (and model resolution) had a big effect in model performance. This is something he has seen before (he is more into theoretical meteorology)."
