email/blog problems + storm recap + Thanksgiving + El Nino

Email updates and blog

I've heard from more than a few of you that these emails have gone missing, so I'm sending this twice. You should be getting it once from my email address and once from the blog ("Admin@....") if you've accepted the invitation to the Google Group. Since the emails got unwieldy I switched everything to the blog and the Google Group. You have to accept the invite from the Google Group to get the updates -- I'm not sending them from my email address anymore. (You can always go to the blog anytime if you think you've missed an email.) And please check your spam/junk folder because I imagine some of you are having that problem. If you still don't get them email me and I'll resend the invite from the Google Group. 

Storm recap

The Friday/Saturday storm was one for the record books (see below). Looking back at the forecasts, they were pretty good. Specifically, the core of Chicago got ~1" that melted quickly, right in line with the forecast. Many suburban areas got 4-6" so that also checks out. But things were definitely understated on the high side, as the high probabilities of >6" clearly did not point to the 8-16" that came down in some spots. It is hard to overstate how unusual that is -- especially in the third week of November -- but in any case, the forecast was clearly off in that regard. 

To highlight another aspect of this storm, downtown Chicago saw about an inch of snow while areas within the same county saw more than a foot. That is a massive dispersion even by Chicago standards. The heavy bands of snow targeting the N/NW suburbs were understated, but overall this was an impressively accurate forecast for such a complex, messy, and unusual storm.  

Officially, ORD recorded a storm total of 11.2" which is very impressive and #2 all-time for November (with the usual caveat about shifting record locations over the years). Chicago normally sees a storm with that much snow once every 3-4 years, and in November it is almost unprecedented. Other official tallies included 5.8" at Midway and 4.7" at NWS in Romeoville.

New records established, from NWS:

• A record maximum daily snowfall was set for November 20th for Chicago as 4.2 inches fell.  The previous record was 2.8 inches set in 1996.
  
• A record maximum daily snowfall was set for November 21st for Chicago as 7.0 inches fell.  The previous record was 3.0 inches set way back in 1893. (The 7" also makes it the third-snowiest calendar day ever recorded.)
  
• There had been zero flakes of snow recorded in Chicago before this major storm, and it goes down as the biggest-ever first snow of the season. 

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To give a little more perspective, the 11.2" just recorded at ORD is nearly one-third of the average for a full year of snow and it was higher than the average snow in any given month. Along those lines, and especially with December setting up mild at least from this distance, there is a chance that November will go down as the snowiest month of the 2015-16 winter. That has only happened once, in 1940. 

Thanksgiving

Temps today and tomorrow will stay in the 30s, although the sunshine will help melt some snow. Clouds will gather on Wednesday as temps warm into the 40s. Thursday looks wet with temps in the mid 50s. Details are tough at the point, but we could see quite a bit of rain, which would obviously create a lot of messy runoff. Email me if you have travel plans or need more specifics as the time approaches. The good news is that major travel delays look unlikely -- there are no large systems hitting any of the major airports on Wednesday/Thursday. 

El Nino

El Nino remains at record levels for now, and while mid-range forecasts are notoriously unreliable this is worth noting. The numbers are almost literally off the chart and in strong agreement regarding extreme December warming across much of North America, especially the northern tier of states. Nothing is written in stone, of course, but this is stunning: