Look, I'm perfectly content with letting everyone do what they please, that's what makes the state great. My concern is 1) this airmass is extremely unusual, 2) most people have never experienced chills like what we expect in the Whites, & 3) we've already had fatalities in the Whites from people (sadly all from MA) who come to enjoy the Whites, are massively underequipped, and don't bother to get good forecasts. If I can help save a few lives with this info, I've done my job.

I think it relates to the amount of heat they can produce:

Pellet stoves: Up to 90,000 BTU/hr

Natural gas-fired furnaces: Up to 140,000 BTU/hr

Oil-fired furnaces: Up to 160,000 BTU/hr

Hey I'm glad meteorologists can teach people new things! So not quite, a tropopause fold/depression occurs just behind a upper-level jet stream associated with a strong cyclone, in this case a piece of the tropospheric Polar Vortex that's been pinched off.

The reason why Bernoulli acceleration occurs at the fold is a difference in density: the bottom of the stratosphere directly above the tropopause gets increasingly warmer, drier, and therefore more stable than the airmass below it. So, that rapidly increasing stability creates the "flow squeeze" effect between the fold and the White Mountains, thus accelerating the winds.

Me too, but the multiple fatalities on the Whites heading into the season paired with the surge of homeless led us to this point.....

I suspect that happens! They (WMUR) waited until the NWS highlighted that, even though this scenario was clearly in play to any sensible meteorologist multiple days in advance. This mechanism is called a tropopause fold and part of the reason why the winds are expected to accelerate so much atop Washington (see the Bernoulli Principle).

"He then turns to me and asks, why so cirrus? Puts the ski in my mouth. Let's put some powder on that face. And so, why so cirrus?"

3,837 out of 752,252 customers (a whopping 0.0051% of the total customer portfolio of all of NH) and less total than the lowest point at the end of the previous two storms. If we're going to consider this chaotic and panic over it, then there are states to the south where folks should consider moving to. This was a non-issue of an event, plain and simple.

Edit: The headline above & the article is lazily written in a way to entice a level of panic (in this case) that's totally unnecessary. "Thousands without power" sounds like a major event until you count the total number of outage jobs left, tally all the mutual aid crews into the state, and consider how many of the remaining customers out have been out the entire time.

I don't blame folks for feeling this way: with trust in TV journalism down below 10%, news directors at local TV stations frantically pivoted to this sensationalist approach in weather to keep ratings up & ad revenue flowing. That's why you see team coverage with multiple meteorologists & reporters for the weakest systems.

If it's still out, you're part of 0.42% of Eversource's total customer portfolio without power. It's a very good thing you didn't buy the hype.

I'd love to know which town, because some of the reports coming in from the White Mountains are even more lackluster than expected

There are a couple of open fallacies in this that I need to address.

"Models are probabilistic": Incorrect. The majority of our guidance (including what you see above) is deterministic, governed complex differential equations. I'm building a statistical weather model at my job, so I'd hope I know the difference.

Skillful meteorologists understand the limitations of each guidance system, their biases, and make forecasts from there. One on display overnight was understanding how models fail to capture warm air advection and smaller features like robust dry air correctly. That's why you saw such a low forecast contrary to most others. Not only was it right, it wasn't aggressive enough but ultimately applied these principles.

Why did I not worry about a lot of wet snow? Simple: the snow growth sucked & the magnitude of warm air advection would easily overpower cold air, so the result would be a rapid transition to ice & rain. That minimizes power outages, which is what we saw.

Yeah, given I lived in an area that was pummeled by both Hurricane Irene & a wet snow storm (each crippled power for 10 days at a time), I'd say this event is rather tame, or laughable. Total outages & outage jobs remain lower than at either of the last two storms, great news.

That's honestly a great question! Given I grew up in New England and went to school in the mountains, my initial answer is no. That said, the caveat is there are a lot of microclimates to keep track of that variable terrain introduces, which I'd argue is the hardest part. The December 2020 snow blitz is an excellent example of this

Haha Al! He's an interesting TV met to say the least, he ironically went to the same college I did!

Right on schedule, as expected it's very light with the main action not slated until sunset!

Who says I'm a TV meteorologist?

You've very likely seen me and my forecasts before, I promise you of that. Would you like to see my atmospheric science degree?

"Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos"

Ha! Given this is going to be driven largely by elevation I've excluded the lower resolution guidance at this point, not to mention all 3 models got torched on how far north the warm front would come.