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Warm Oceans Turned a 3-Inch Forecast into a Record NYC Blizzard

50 points| s-xyz | 7 days ago |umbrellatoday.app

31 comments

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Merrill|6 days ago

Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service New York NY 344 PM EST Fri Feb 20 2026 Issued by NWS Upton, NY

https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=O...

Confidence has increased enough to warrant winter storm watch issuance for the entire CWA. Latest 12Z guidance coming into better agreement on potent northern stream shortwave energy diving SW from wrn Canada and the northern Plains into the plains and mid Mississippi valley by Sunday morning, phasing with southern stream coming out of the SW states and Mexico to carve out a deep closed low aloft over the Mid Atlantic and induce rapid cyclogenesis off the Mid Atlantic coast, with the surface low bombing out from from 1008 mb off the N Carolina coast Sunday morning to 970-975 mb near 38-39N/71W by Monday morning, then passing just outside the 40N/70W benchmark Monday afternoon, GFS still more intense and closer to the coast than the ECMWF, with its heaviest snow bands directly over the area as opposed to just offshore. NAM and SREF have both trended toward a heavier snowfall scenario as well, which has been a good signal in past heavy snowfall events.

Snow should start Sunday morning, and may mix with rain at times especially in the NYC metro area, NE NJ and western Long Island. Then as precip intensity picks up later in the day Sunday p-type should become all snow throughout. Heaviest snow looks to fall from late day Sunday into Monday morning, then snow tapers off Monday afternoon.

Greatest likelihood of seeing 6+ inches will be along the coast, especially eastern Long Island where up to a foot of accumulation is possible. Winds will also be strong Sunday night into Monday morning especially along the coast as the sfc low deepens, with blowing and drifting snow and some downed tree limbs as winds gust to at least 40-45 mph, and possible blizzard conditions in Suffolk, and near blizzard conditions elsewhere along the coast including NYC. NAM/GFS both signal potential for wind gusts to 60 mph late Sunday night into Monday morning, though these winds can sometimes be overdone in heavy snow events. If trends for heavy snow and strong winds continue to increase and expand northward, the potential for blizzard conditions could encompass all coastal areas.

qave|7 days ago

Beautiful new york

blell|7 days ago

They don't know what's going to happen tomorrow but they know what's going to happen in 30 years.

scrumper|7 days ago

A bit of scorn coming your way in the replies but it's not necessarily intuitive if you haven't thought about it. Some analogies that might help:

- If I play roulette in a casino today, I might win big, break even, lose a little or lose a lot. If I play roulette in a casino every day for a decade, I can be nearly certain I will lose a lot.

- Consider an ant walking on a rough stone road built up the side of a hill. If you look at the ant at any particular second, its body might be pointing up (head higher than tail) or down (vice versa) or level, depending on what particular angle of rock it's on at that time. But measured over minutes its likely to be at a greater altitude above sea level than where it started. Measured over the hours it takes to get from the bottom to the top, it's definitely higher.

- A random day of the year (pick from 1-365) in England might be sunny or rainy, but the chances of it being sunnier are higher if the day picked is in the summer.

The point is that there's a tremendous amount of noise in short-term measurements which tend to smooth out over longer term where trends are more clearly revealed. That's the counterpoint to your argument and the reason why climate prediction is not the same as weather forecasting. Going back to the casino analogy, climate prediction is looking at your bank balance over decades; weather forecasting is deciding how to bet on a particular poker hand.

(And finally, we actually kind of do mostly know what's going to happen tomorrow, but not a week out; that's not the point you're making though.)

baueric|7 days ago

Are you really equating daily weather predictions with meteorological science? That's like saying "they don't know what the next 3 coin flips are going to be but they know half of the next 10,000 will be tails"

tracerbulletx|7 days ago

Because energy in > energy out is a pretty simple non-chatoic thermodynamic equation with pretty limited variables and weather is one of the most complicated dynamic fractal systems imaginable. Why is this hard to understand? You might as well complain that they haven't described the exact curvature of the coast line of England at the nanometer level and yet they can avoid crashing ships into it with GPS.

fuzzfactor|6 days ago

The more you pay attention to what already happened, the deeper your observation might be.

Apparently there was just a hurricane in winter and it struck New York.

I guess not everybody is going to have any understanding at all, you proably had to be there :\

nDRDY|7 days ago

And this contrasts with other fields - for example, in orbital mechanics, we're pretty darn certain where the Earth will be tomorrow. We're a bit less sure about 30 years, and increasingly uncertain after that.

triceratops|7 days ago

Yes, that's essentially correct. Unintuitive if you don't understand statistics, but correct.

jghn|7 days ago

Do you really not understand that this actually makes a lot of sense?

threetwoonezero|7 days ago

If we're talking about dynamic systems then it makes sense