Storm quotes'n'forecasts

[gerisullivan]

1. Seen earlier today: "After 11pm tonight, no cars other than emergency vehicles would be allowed on streets in the state of New York - and the Mayor de Blasio emphasized that 'a food delivery bicycle is not an emergency vehicle'."

2. On MassLive.com:

▶ Complete Blizzard 2015 coverage
▶ Gov. Baker activates 500 National Guard troops for blizzard
▶ Western Mass. parking bans for winter snowstorm announced
▶ PVTA bus service suspened
▶ Will your nearest Dunkin' Donuts location be open?

I've lived in Massachusetts long enough to find the presence of that last item unsurprising. Heck, it's downright expected.

3. The forecasts: last night, weather.gov was forecasting 21-31" for Wales. This morning, it was 22-32". It's now dropped to 18-28". I'm all but doing a happy dance over the latest numbers. Accuweather has us at 28.9"; The Weather Channel has my favorite (if untrusted) numbers with 14-21" and Weather Underground is even better at 13-20". According to MassLive.com, the top three single-storm snowfalls in Western Massachusetts have all happened since I moved here. I'll be happy if this one fails to make the top ten.

Comments

[dalmeny]

Is there no national source of weather predictions? Weather estimates are pretty consistent here (although they may change over time) because they all come from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Stay warm and safe.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Weather.gov is the National Weather Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They're the ones who issue formal watches, warnings, and such, and is the national service you're asking about.

Accuweather, The Weather Channel, and Weather Underground are all commercial services. The latter two are now owned by the same company, which perhaps explains why their forecasts are so similar in this case.

Does the Australian Bureau of Meteorology run dozens of different models for each storm, looking for where the models converge and how broad the spread is? Different models lead to different forecasts, and the different weather services weight the models differently. For example, up through last night, there was one outlier model that showed much lower accumulations than all of the other models. The National Weather Service forecast didn't include that model but Accuweather's did. It's fun to watch the weather chat.

[redbird]

If you want more, the National Weather Service puts a forecast discussion on their webpage. The current one for where Geri lives includes the statement that this is a "high confidence forecast" and "KEY TO THE FORECAST IS THE LOCATION OF THE CLOSING H85 / H7 LOW AND PARENT CYCLONIC WARM- AND DRY-CONVEYOR BELT MOTIONS." (They're no longer sending them out over teletype machines, but the detailed text forecasts are still in all-caps.)

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yes, those discussions can be great fun to read even if you're not a weather geek. For example, this line from an earlier discussion at the link redbird provided: "ITS BOMBOGENESIS BABY!"

[redbird]

By the end of the 2005 hurricane season, the forecasters were clearly getting a bit punchy, so we got bits like "AND WITH THE SOUTHWARD COMPONENT OF MOTION CONTINUING IT SEEMS THAT AN IMMINENT EXTRATROPICAL TRANSITION IS...ALAS...A LOST CAUSE" [ellipses in the original].

[pameladean]

Yes! They get quite carried away with the sheer beauty of certain weather patterns and talk about a "nice" area of convection that is going to produce not-so-nice results.

P.

[drplokta]

A food delivery bicycle may not be an emergency vehicle, but it's also not a car. So they should be unaffected by a curfew on cars.

[thinkum]

Love the DD note -- definitely a critical piece of data in New England. ;-)

The less snow, the better, as Jerry has to do all the shoveling right now. I have no idea how much we've gotten so far, as the wind is blustering so fiercely that the balcony is scoured clean.