Webberweather

We haven't seen 10" of snow in a single storm or winter for that matter in Charlotte since 2003-04, over 15 years ago. March 1960 provided virtually 2 10"+ storms in the span of a week w/ a few other nickel/dime events thrown in the mix. I have a gigantic archive of NC winter storm maps going back to 1895 on my site: https://www.webberweather.com/about.html

Come. To. Papa. The EPS is going in the right direction for my backyard.

Many of the big dogs down here in Charlotte come from suppressed anafronts... Looks like one of those might be incoming on this Euro run.

In a perfect world, I'd like to see the southern stream s/w cut-off from the parent trough & emerge from the southern Rockies at about the same time our big SE Canada vortex is entering the Atlantic. The composite MSLP & 500mb anomalies for every CAD event that produced significant snow & ice in the Carolinas since the late 1940s look like this: There are nearly 100 cases & over 200 days in these composites.

I really like the way the GFS & GEFS have been trending w/ the shortwave that enters California in about 60-66 hours (going towards yesterday's weenie 12z Euro run). If we can continue to get more digging & more stream separation on future runs, I might be in business for a winter storm later next week.

It's definitely been a while since I've seen anything that could be remotely legitimate like this on the horizon for my backyard. 99.9% of the time you see at most 1 or 2 members with any snow beyond day 10. Legs?

12z Euro & EPS are virtually identical out to at least day 7. I'm a big fan of this.

ECMWF in fantasy land is an absolutely classic southern slider look w/ a deep SE Canada vortex, North Pacific block & active southern stream. Timing is everything in this pattern...

Observed + 7 day GFS forecast taking us thru nearly the first half of December. We're roughly par for the course in the 2010s over the SE US w/ temps running 3-4F above normal. At least it's not a bonafide torch.

There was another heart breaker in January 1973... No, I wasn't, best storm I can recall here is February 26-27 2004 & I was in Fayetteville at that time. We had about 6-7" of heavy wet snow during the initial overrunning event, changed over to sleet, then we got another inch or so in the trailing upper low.

Yep. There's definitely a good reason -EPO/+TNH + active southern jet is my favorite pattern... It comes w/ obvious caveats, and if the SE US ridge is too expansive/strong I may be hitting the links instead of seeing "white gold" in my backyard. There's very little room for error in a pattern like this down here.

This is personally my favorite type of large-scale pattern to have, I'd take this over -NAOs almost every day of the week. Reason being huge -EPO/+TNH with an active southern stream is the pattern that most frequently occurs in conjunction w/ southern sliders.

This is definitely a case where very minor details in the storm track driven by individual synoptic-scale "events" can grow upscale quickly & dramatically alter the sensible weather over a large geographic region. The EPS basically nailed the evolution of the planetary-scale features 10-14 days out which is really all you can ask for at that range. However, once the individual shortwaves within these planetary scale features could be resolved this led to very small tweaks in the North Pacific storm track. Those tweaks changed everything ~ Dec 10 because the primary lobe of the tropospheric polar vortex is sitting in our backyard over Northern Canada.

In many cases, the evolution of these planetary-scale features is driven by upscale growth from individual synoptic-scale waves whose predictability is often limited to several days to a week or so. I certainly thought we were going to take a breather ~ Dec 10-30 ish, but you can basically throw that idea in the trash. Giving credit where it's due, at least in terms of sensible impacts in the eastern US, the GEFS has made the EPS look silly in week 2.

At this juncture, no I think the pattern will become more receptive to -NAOs & more persistent cold near the beginning of January & beyond instead of what we're dealing w/ atm which is large scale transience. The +IOD is beginning to show signs of degradation & once we legitimately dislodge the majority of the convective forcing from the Indian Ocean & into the West Pacific/Western Hemisphere (even if it's not a permanent change), which I anticipate will start to happen as soon as late in the month, things could get interesting.