Pattern-based Snowfall Climatology for North Georgia

Over the past several years, it has been increasingly difficult to make accurate snowfall amount predictions for the North Georgia Mountains, partly due to the decreasing numbers of volunteers to measure snowfall. The goal of this study is to characterize snowfall observations from National Weather Service cooperative observers between 1950 and 2013 across north Georgia and organize the results into different flow regimes, such as northwest flow at 500 hPa and east flow at 850 hPa. Additional classification schemes are being considered, such as the maximum vertical motion in the storm region. Data from the North American Regional Reanalysis (Mesinger et al 2006) will be used to select and analyze the regimes. Once the pattern-based climatologies are developed, we hope to incorporate the results into tools used to forecast snowfall at the National Weather Service.