Saturday, November 6, 2021

First snow coming down the pike?

 There are rumors of the first flakes of the year on the horizon. What say you?

32 comments:

  1. Welcome back Bill….thank you for another season of Minnesota snow discussions! Are you visiting the great Northland anytime this winter??
    And too all you weather snow junkies we have weather system of interest this coming Thursday/Friday…I’m fairly confident we will see our “first snow” of the season with this one, now will that be a trace or an inch or several inches to shovel that remains to be seen but remember the ground will be very warm leading up to this leading to a lot of melting of the snow, it can just be a case of “snow in the air” with this one. But what this storm will introduce is a pattern change to follow with consistently cool/colder weather with predominantly a northwest flow which could/should trigger several clipper-like systems.
    Let me leave you with the NWS discussion from this afternoon, which in a nutshell one word comes to mind…..uncertainty:
    The main topic of concern continues to be the large trough moving
    into the region introducing chances for precipitation as early as
    Wednesday and continuing potentially into Friday and Saturday. Models
    continue to disagree on the exact timing and track, with the GFS
    trending faster/weaker with the last 12 hours of runs while the ECMWF
    has sped up and looks a bit more in line to the previous GFS runs.
    Our PoP forecast continues to reflect the uncertainty with 40- 60
    peak PoPs on Thursday despite there being fairly good agreement that
    precipitation will be happening, with the differences in timing and
    location of the surface response being the big question. Rainfall is
    initially expected with a chance for snowfall mainly on Thursday
    night into Friday morning, with the current NBM still only producing
    a few tenths of an inch of snowfall with around 0.75-1`` overall
    liquid QPF. The GEFS 50th percentile is also sitting at around 0.8``
    liquid QPF with a few tenths of snow. This more reflects uncertainty
    than an actual forecast of snow, as it still highly depends on the
    strength and track of the system as it moves through, and we could
    end up with more snow or none at all. Suffice to say that for now,
    keep a curious eye on this system but there are still a multitude of
    potential outcomes that make it too soon to come out with any more
    detail.

    Welcome back everyone and let’s hope the 2021-2022 winter season delivers for us snow junkies!!

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  2. Sorry not sure why we got two posts of the same thing….go ahead a delete one if you like Bill, sorry.

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  3. Thanks for the new season of snow-loving blog posts, Bill. It's so beautiful outside right now that it's hard to believe what the forecast is predicting for a week from now. Let's see how it plays out........ and hopefully this won't post double like bigdaddy's posts!

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    1. I have no idea what I’m doing wrong, am the least technical guy on here, please enlighten me if I’m messing up…if not I’ll just stop posting because it’s stupid seeing double posts.

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    2. Well, this one didn't double! :+) I know on my iphone sometimes it glitches and does 'doubles'.... but on a laptop I have no clue. Hopefully someone else has some ideas; don't give up posting. I enjoy reading your posts.

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  4. Welcome back everyone. Please - no snow this early!

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  5. Hey Big Daddy. No plans at present to visit the Northland. Maybe if I hear the blizzard of the century is headed that way I can sneak in before it happens. (And then get out after a few days of bitter cold satisfy my appetite.)

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  6. Welcome back, team! The weather has been downright beautiful this fall, but if we’re going to get snow, make it an entertaining storm to track!

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  7. Well, Mr Novak has posted a map on FB of the upcoming latter part of the week/weekend, and it looks like a 'taste of flakes' for us or a half inch at most in the metro. But...... it's a start! We still seem to be in a precip drought, but with much colder air (yin/yang below normal cold) pouring in and what looks like below normal temps on the horizon...... let the precip after this rain event be snow.

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  8. Hi All...thought I'd check in and see if this site was back at it for another Winter. I'll have to live vicariously through y'all since I'm now a resident of Charlotte, NC.

    It's been in the 70s this week...absolutely lovely...but I know I'm going to miss having snowstorms to track.

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    1. Oh, NO! Bill out west, you out east...... some of us are hanging in. Thanks for stopping by, and yes, you can live vicariously through what's going on at the websites and our posts. I'm happy this blog continues, though it's changed in terms of posts over the years from when I first discovered it. I'm glad it's still here. And again, nice to see you here even if you are now in a warmer state both literally and figuratively! :+)

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  9. Nothing to do. Back to bed. Wet asphalt. West metro.

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  10. Bummer: Strib weather note today: "MSP averages around 7 inches of snow in November. We've only had 1.2 inches this year." Will the water drought continue through winter? Hoping not........

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    1. Yeah it sucks….definitely not like the snow start of last year where we had a snowy October, but if you recall last year after the snows of October….November was snow free and pretty much December as well…we eked out our white Christmas with a storm two days before the big day! Hopefully that’s not the case this year but we are off to a slow start because the rest of November doesn’t look all that exciting for snowfall which is a bummer because if you recall from my original post to start this thread I was really expecting a train or at minimum a couple of clippers to come on thru with this predominantly northwest-west flow but all we could muster was that 1.2”, so that’s disappointing. Hopefully we could turn on the snow spigot sometime soon!

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  11. This pretty much sums up our weather right thru Thanksgiving and beyond…in a nutshell…..Quiet! And the NWS employee didn’t seem all too happy either, with the wasted cold bit, can’t say I don’t blame them!

    The next week will feature a little bit of temperature whiplash
    thanks to a fairly progressive flow, with us switching between above
    normal temperatures and below normal temperatures every 48 hours or
    so. This will feature a 2 cool days followed by 2 warmer days and so
    on. There will be some decent winds in there during the frontal
    passages. Precip chances are looking hard to come by for us, with no
    major systems looking to impacts the Upper MS Valley through
    Thanksgiving weekend, with mainly dry frontal passages expected for
    us.

    Beyond Monday: No surprise here if you`ve been paying attention to
    the prevailing weather pattern. South winds and quickly moderating
    temperatures for Tuesday into Wednesday, with another strong cold
    front coming through Wednesday, which at the moment is looking to
    give us a dry and cold Thanksgiving with highs in the 20s. Overall, it`ll
    be an unfortunate waste of cold air in a rather benign weather
    pattern.

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  12. Not looking good my fellow snowlovers…..November appears to be starting out slow in the snow department for us….not seeing much of anything in terms of snow the rest of November just a roller coaster of temperatures from 20’s to 30’s to possibly a 50° back to 20’s to 30’s and 40’s again. There’s no break to this pattern. Hopefully December can whiten things up! Go team snow!!

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    1. When doing a run accumulated QPF for the next 240 hours for the GFS
      and ECMWF you get 0.00" for most of our CWA. That`s right, 10 days
      of nothing as our dry weather pattern looks to persist. Looking at
      the EPS, you don`t really start seeing signs of a more significant
      shift in the pattern until December 3rd and beyond, so we`re about 2
      weeks out from seeing something other than our generally dry weather
      with above normal temperatures that is broken up by brief cool downs
      behind dry cold fronts.

      Translation…..2+ weeks of Boring!! @PWL you need to do something to shake things up in our atmosphere 😜

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  13. Plymouth Weather LoverNovember 21, 2021 at 7:07 PM

    First comment for this winter:

    Thanksgiving Dance will be happening soon! Warming up!

    Bring it!!!!

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  14. Happy Thanksgiving 🦃🍽🍁 to all my fellow winter weather enthusiasts! Cheers to all, hopefully your enjoying some quality time with family and friends. I’m still looking and searching for our first significant snowfall…it’s out there just a matter of time.

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  15. There maybe some winter weather to peek everyone’s interest in the long range models. All the major models show(in varying degrees) winter storms in our neck of the woods starting next weekend and continuing the following week, so I’m looking at ~12/4-12/5 timeframe and beyond. Temperatures also start to cool off then too to levels that support snow. So time will tell but I think we get more active as we get past this warmer period fr this upcoming week.

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    1. Agreed. Novak is dangling the possibility out there, too.... so can't wait to see what develops. Keep us posted.

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  16. My feeling is any storm in the early December time frame is mostly in northern MN.

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  17. Well I see some on here are already willing the snow to come, keep waiting folks. If your the lover of snow it doesnt look good, storms will miss to the north and the south over the next 10 or so days with another warm up towards the middle of the month, 50's in mid December not of of the question. The pattern is mostly lovely if you hate winter weather and horrible if your a snowlover. It will come down to the wire just like last year once again if we will have a White Christmas in MSP this year. Who would have thought Minneapolis would get rain on December 1st and struggle for white Christmas two years in a row.

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  18. Plymouth Weather LoverDecember 2, 2021 at 9:48 PM

    Just hearing/seeing the word snow in the forecast - as uncertain as it is - just makes me stock up on my depends and dust off those dancing shoes. Bring it!!!

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    1. What in the ….. so disturbing.

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  19. Well there you have it folks, it RAINED again last night, not snow in Minneapolis. 3 days into December and it has rained twice also winter storm watches up for up north, just like I alluded to two days ago storms will miss to the north, next week they will miss to the south. MSP get ready for snuckered snow job this December, snowlovers(even the dancing ones) will be clearly unhappy. Tick tock on that white Christmas(looks at watch).

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  20. It’s a nice blanket of white outside my window here in the west metro. They say it will stop soon but we’ll see. I’d say a solid inch thus far!

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  21. Minneapolis is the new LouisvilleDecember 5, 2021 at 6:15 PM

    Winter haters rejoice, it will be 40 (if not in the 40's) again by Thursday. But wait...there's more! This is from the NWS discussion this afternoon for the week of December 13: "For next week, the ensembles continue to show an anonymously strong ridge building into the Great Lakes with southwest flow developing for us. If we don`t end up with a decent amount of snow cover this week, the h85 and h5 patterns next week certainly point to the potential for seeing temperatures 10+ degrees above normal for at least a couple of days." Remember when December used to be a winter month in all of MN, not just the northern part of the state? December in southern MN anymore is nothing more than an extension of mid-November. Winters in the southern half of the state really do start later than they used to. I can't say they definitely end earlier (of course last year was a non-winter, so it started late/ended early). I hope this is not yet another season of frustration shaping up for MN winter fans. I truly hope we aren't getting to the point where regardless of the ENSO status (La Nina, El Nino, Neutral) our winters are warm and wimpy. Sorry to vent, it's just that I am starting to see the signs of another potentially non-winter (I hope I am wrong!!). It reminds me too much of being a Vikings fan. Pre-season forecasts appear hopeful, sometimes even encouraging, only to see the season go down the gutter. I know winter technically is just starting and things can change quickly (again, I hope they do!). However, all indications I am currently seeing from multiple sources are winter won't arrive in southern MN (if at all) until maybe sometime in early January? Time will tell!

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  22. Wow, you're right Minneapolis/Louisville. Last winter was warmer here than I thought. I just checked the records for MSP: December 2020 was 5.6 degrees above average; January 2021 was 6.5 degrees above average; February was very cold though. It was 9.1 degrees below average; and March was 7.7 degrees above average. And to think it was a La Nina winter!! This winter is too. Yikes!!

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  23. "he h85 and h5 patterns next week certainly point to the potential for seeing temperatures 10+ degrees above normal for at least a couple of day" --- SWEET

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  24. NEW - Sweden records the lowest December temperature in 35 years with -43.8°C in Naimakka. Global warming...

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  25. Lastest data shows a miss for MSP on Friday(NAM),also Novak alluded to a shift south of the snow where the heaviest will be in SE MN. MSP inline for a third straight cosmetic snowfall? Regardless it all melts with the blowtorch warmth next week.

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