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Thursday, August 7

GET OUT AND ENJOY THE DRY WEATHER


Written By:  Scott Hetsko

You've been soaked over the past 4 or 5 weeks!  A persistent upper level trough in the Northeast allow a series of storms to cross Western New York with soaking and flooding storms from time to time.  Currently and through the weekend, high pressure out of Canada will deliver sunny days with low humidity.

Our next shot at showers or storms doesn't look likely until next Tuesday and Wednesday.  Enjoy the break and get some Summer before it's gone!

10 comments:

  1. Wow. And many on this blog state that it has not been a wet, cool summer. It has been very very wet. I have been cutting my grass 2 times per week all summer. That is highly unusual.

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  2. Those of you who state this has not been a cold summer. A report just came out stating that the summer of 2014 is the coldest in a decade.

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  3. Looks like yet another cloudy rainy week ahead. These last few days were awesome. Sunny and dry. Wish it could last another week.

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    1. Next weekend looks dry for the most part at least.

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  4. No one denies that total rainfall has been well above average this summer. But then we have people stating that the whole thing has been a complete washout when in fact we've had numerous dry stretches lasting several days, and additionally the frequency of rainy days has been running slightly below average. And as for "coldest summer in a decade," that's probably either for the entire globe or the entire northern hemisphere. Here at home we've been right around average, and as I recall the June-July stretch during 2009 was much cooler than this one was.

    On a semi-related note, I thought this juxtaposition of news reports was pretty hilarious when I saw it a short while ago:
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/weather-summer-2014-to-be-hottest-on-record-9122575.html
    http://nypost.com/2014/08/08/summer-2014-is-coldest-in-a-decade/

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  5. More hints about the upcoming winter season:

    http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2014/08/11/growing-signs-coming-winter-colder-snowier-last/

    Be very mindful of the message being conveyed in the first two sentences.
    I've noticed that the various forecaster outlooks and model predictions for the upcoming winter have largely been predicated on the forecasted El Nino being a Modoki event. I've explained what "Modoki" refers to in the past, but for those who weren't there or don't remember it basically means that the warm anomalies are evenly distributed across the equatorial Pacific basin, differing from a standard El Nino where the anomalies are biased towards one region of the basin (east, central or west). Two of the winters that Dan Satterfield (author of the blog I posted and a highly respected expert in his field) specifically alluded to as analogs for the upcoming winter were some of the harshest in history for the Lower 48. Those are the winters of 1976-77 and 2009-10, whose impacts in our region differed rather substantially from each other. It's still very early, but what I've been seeing lately is a loose, strictly tentative consensus pointing to a generally colder than average winter for the eastern states.

    In other news, another potentially heavy rainfall is on the way for tonight through tomorrow. Par for the course.

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  6. CCCC, the problem with predicting winters for us is that we sit in a spot where too much of a good thing turns into a bad thing for snow lovers. In, 2009-2010 the NAO was too negative and moved the storm track too far east. Last year we were fortunate to have such a persistent ridge in the west that gave us a seemingly unlimited supply of cold air. Looking at the article and the fact that we have been stuck in a trough pretty much the entire summer, I like our chances of a snowier winter. And let's not forget that last year we were robbed of at least a foot of snow due to absolutely embarrassing reporting/measuring by the NWS.

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  7. Our more northerly latitude absolutely puts us in the suppression screw zone quite frequently, and we were there very often during 2009-10. Thing is that Satterfield is using that season as his top analog. Not too terrible especially since the tail end of that season featured a decent storm, but it was also our only significant storm that entire winter. That said, just because that season is the top analog according to one person doesn't mean we should expect a winter exactly like that one, all it means is that he believes that the general pattern is most likely to be similar to that one. Details which have yet to be ironed out, and won't be for quite awhile, could create vastly different results especially for snowfall. I won't comment on our odds of above/near/below average snowfall right now, or probably at all, because such predictions are sordidly difficult to make given the inherent unpredictability in forecasting storm threats at long ranges. It only takes a few hefty snowfalls to bring us from well below average to near or even slightly above. Even last season over half of our total snow occurred from just six events, with a lot of dry time in between. I think last season we lucked out in the snowfall department because the pattern was progressive enough to deliver many quick-hitting storm threats over short periods, and as you mentioned also we had persistent enough cold to increase our chances of getting hit by the cold side of a number of those storms.

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    Replies
    1. Chris now in PenfieldAugust 12, 2014 at 8:53 PM

      What was / were the analog years for the 13-14 winter? What a strange setup it was. A deep, central Pacific trough that caused a conveyor belt of cold air to tumble down the east side of the Rockies and freeze out the upper midwest and most of the northeast in a way they/we had not experienced in a decade. But there was a mildly positive NAO and AO. Weird. That same pattern caused a few unusual warm ups in December and early January, plus another in late February because the trough was centered over the central part of the country. We then became susceptible to gushes of warm air from the Gulf. Anyone remember the two week stretch in early to mid January when it was in the 40s-50s every day? I do!

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  8. Looks like yet another rainiy stretch coming this week. The beat goes on.

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