Pattern still favorable but obs show TwitterWx <> Weather

The weatherpeople are always wrong. You people have been telling us for weeks that we will get a lot of snow along the east coast because of this high latitude blocking and negative NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) and AO (Arctic Oscillation). I am a simple person. You pretend everything is complicated but you were wrong. What's going on? Why did Madrid get 8 inches of snow? Did your forecast just miss by 3,595 miles?

Well, let's tackle this one briefly. Not twitter brief but more on that in the 3rd paragraph. As my last post discussed, the forecasted pattern of a -NAO was favorable for snowstorms on the east coast. We have seen that forecast "verify" as the METs say but we have gotten nothing. What gives? Well the simple answer is that there are many ingredients needed for an east coast snow storm and we only have a few of the ingredients. You can make a great sauce from as little as 3 and as many as 100 ingredients For a weather blog written by a novice, let's start the sauce making discussion with the big 3. For a marinara, I like tomatoes (canned, peeled san marzano), extra virgin olive oil and salt. For snowstorms, I like an arctic high pressure off greenland, moisture (ideally from the gulf coast) and upper air instability. As the snow in Austin Texas illustrated this week, we had two of the three with cold air and moisture. The third ingredient, upper air instability was lacking as the low pressure skirted just south (LOL) of the NYC broadcast viewing area. 

So this brings me to my third point. Which can be answered like any good rabbi will tell you with another question. Why were the METs on Twitter so excited? Well TwitterWx does not equal Weather. And here's the rub. The atmosphere and atmospheric science around an east coast snow storm is a fair bit more complicated than a good marinara. And some things don't fit nearly in 280 characters.

For the snow weenies like me that hold out hope like a New York Mets fan in March each year, check out John Kassel's latest tweet with some great images from WeatherBell which I have included below that show the pattern of NOA- and AO- will likely continue through the end of the month. This bodes well for those of you who like the white stuff and don't live in the Green Mountains or West Texas.