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Pattern January 2020 - Operation Thaw Alaska

From the looks of the free maps, there are some downright cold members in there as well. A good handful are well warmer however, but the cold ones range from freezing to near zero in places.

Maybe some of those colder ones have more ridging poking into the west coast along with a AK ridge instead of a Aleutian/GOA ridge
 
Wrong we had storms in March and January last winter definitely trackable events
Not to mention snow on 3 different occasions this season in northern Middle Tennessee including almost a half inch here in early November. It’s not just here either as I’m pretty sure places in Alabama and Georgia also got snow earlier this month. Eastern Tennessee has also done quite good so far this winter. Now I’m not saying the pattern isn't concerning considering what happened last year, but I’ve seen far far worse starts to a winter at this point in the season in prior years.
 
View attachment 29141
Looks like EPS agrees with Op

This period (Jan 5-15) I highlighted a few weeks ago seems to be living on & the pattern change appears to be roughly on schedule. I'll definitely admit, it's not how I envisioned we'd get there w/ the strong tropospheric polar vortex migrating towards Alaska but w/ tropical forcing temporarily returning to the western Hemisphere at the beginning of January & a chunk of the vortex appearing to migrate towards SE Canada & the Lakes, plus the active subtropical jet we've had this winter, I think an opportunity could appear on the horizon in this period of time, which is also near our peak climo for cold.

"...I think a legit window of opportunity for us to pot a winter storm is starting to emerge just before the mid point of January (Jan 5-15 ish)..."
https://southernwx.com/community/threads/the-great-december-dump.650/page-116#post-220711

"I'd wager that the pattern flips for us around January 5-10 ish."
https://southernwx.com/community/threads/the-great-december-dump.650/page-114#post-220390


Based on some back-of-the-envelope research I conducted a few winters ago, if we get a winter storm in this pattern, it would tend to occur about the time -VP200 anomalies associated with this slow moving Convectively Coupled Kelvin Wave reach 30-60E longitude, where an upper level westerly wind duct opens up near the equator & encourages equatorward wave propagation in the W Hem. Empirical wave propagation (i.e. extrapolating the propagation of this CCKW forward in time) also would support a threat window sometime during the 2nd week of January (January 8-14) with a day or two of wiggle room on either side.

It would be kind of fitting to have a threat in this period because I have to leave for conference in Boston ~January 11th-12th.

vp200.GFS.anom.KELVIN.5S-5N.png
 
Waiting on game to start. Here’s a similar pattern that had a SE winter

80c07bf1795420a2637ee95ec540f1f6.gif




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According to an accuweather lead long-range meteorologist, it will cool down some after the first week of Jan and then return to above normal for the second half of Jan. So we have a 7 day window to score.
 
I had an epiphany today out at the links. The southeast is the new Florida. I think it’s time to accept that. I’m kind of ok with that new reality. It will still snow, sometimes..and those days will be magical. But the days in between will be the days that I live for. And that’s ok..EDIT: read that slowly and more than once..my apologies!
 
Waiting on game to start. Here’s a similar pattern that had a SE winter storm.

There was some extreme cold involved in that 1982 system. Eastern Kentucky and Eastern Tennessee had mid 10s below 0 lows and upper single digit to low 10s for highs. Lots of upslope snow too, main system had 4-6 inches here but snow fell on 8 consecutive days. The first 8 days of January that year were really warm too, around +10. The rest of the month was so cold here it finished up -7 for January. Huntsville and Chattanooga got below 0 that outbreak. Athens, Ga had a high of 70 on January 7th and a low of 0 on the 11th. Atlanta went from 67 to -5 from the 7th to the 11th with about 6 inches of snow over 3 days.

So that look can apparently produce huge winter results.
 
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