Webberweather53
Meteorologist
Web, I know you are a very intelligent fellow. I really enjoy your excellent analysis of all the models. However, as good as you are, and as good as the models are, neither of you can give a consistently accurate forecast for the next 10 days. Why should we buy into what's gonna happen 50 to 75 years down the road.AND What do these unsubstantiated global warming theories have to do with Jan 2020? You guys have a global warming thread!
Uhh no, I've been very adamant on how the pattern was going to evolve going forward and the threat window for wintry weather ~ Jan 5-10, specify exactly where I've been inconsistent because as far as I can tell, I haven't been.
There's a massive difference of scale when dealing with day-to-day, years, and multidecadal forecasts, the same level of detail can not be expected at both scales. This is an often overused argument, because we can't predict the location of some random thunderstorm in my backyard at "x" day does not mean we also can't predict the long-term slowly evolving temperature trend over a period of several decades. The processes acting at these scales are highly disparate from one another and the evolution of some thunderstorm over a short period of time "t" will have virtually no impact on the large-scale temperature over a period of several decades when thousands of said storms are observed, i.e. it's "noise". As for global warming, it's a symptom of climate change, it simply can't be ignored when assessing long-term underlying tendencies in snowfall in the southeastern US and comparing modern winters & storms of today to those in the early 20th & late 19th century. Here our limiting factor for snow almost always is a lack of cold air, both theory and historical observations at reliable observing sites like Columbia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, Greenville, SC, Wilmington, NC, (just to name a few) are exhibiting significant-very significant long-term downward trends in seasonal snowfall which is almost certainly due to a warming climate alone. In areas of the US where the basic state climate is cold enough to support snow even in warm winters, it really doesn't matter (yet) and snowfall increases if anything during the heart of winter, because there's more moisture being fluxed around the globe & moist static energy increases as a function of temperature. It's complicated yes, it's not unsubstantiated, and this sort of discussion is entirely on topic.