I'm going to also put a nail in the coffin of the FV3. I don't mean this as a slight to anyone. In fact, I was hoping it was going to be right. And I guess there's still a chance it could. But as far as I'm concerned, it lucked into the December storm. It appears to have blown this upcoming storm. It has also completely blown chunks with it's LR pattern depictions all winter long. It has a pronounced cold bias and a bias of overly strong high pressures. It seems to have a lot of work cut out for itself to even be a better model than the GFS.
And one more thing, as this gets talked about a lot. I actually agree that it's often warm before snowstorms around here. That's not because of magic or fairy dust or some other mystical force at work in the atmosphere. It's simply because the weather is very variable in the Southeast, and getting to 60 or even 70 several times during the winter is not uncommon, especially over the last decade or so. We're going to get a good test of this theory right now, actually. So far, I don't see any threat of any significant snowstorms on the horizon around here.
Pattern changes often lead to winter storms. That doesn't mean that a good, locked in winter storm pattern wouldn't be better, though. It most definitely would. But we don't get those anymore. We get much more variety in the pattern, which is why when you get a winter storm nowadays, you can almost always point to a recent period prior where the temp was warm or warmish.
