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Record W4417040279 · doi:10.1175/waf-d-25-0040.1

Large-Scale Dynamics, Thermodynamics, and Predictability of the 4–25 February 2019 Extreme Precipitation Period in Eastern North America

2025· article· W4417040279 on OpenAlex
Yeechian Low, John R. Gyakum

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueWeather and Forecasting · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicClimate variability and models
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
FundersNational Weather ServiceNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsPrecipitationRidgeFlooding (psychology)Period (music)PredictabilityFlash floodTrough (economics)Snow

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Extreme precipitation is often challenging to predict but can have substantial impacts through flooding and loss of life and property, especially when it is persistent and affects a large region. The 4–25 February 2019 extreme precipitation period in eastern North America (NA) was exceptionally persistent, contributing to extreme winter rainfall and flooding in the Ohio and Tennessee River valleys and unusually heavy snowfall to the north. The period featured anomalous upper-level ridges in eastern NA and the central North Pacific (NP) and an anomalous upper-level trough in western NA, a favorable synoptic configuration for precipitation in eastern NA. The central NP ridge was prominent and extremely persistent, helping to slow and amplify the planetary-scale weather pattern. Within eastern NA, precipitation was lighter, less convective, and more synoptically forced in northern areas, while it was heavier at times and more convective in southern areas. Numerical weather models did not skillfully forecast the weather pattern associated with the onset of the extreme precipitation period beyond a lead time of 7 days, but they were able to more accurately forecast the continuation and persistence of the weather pattern once it started. For this case, simulating the synoptic structure over the NP before the extreme precipitation period accurately is crucial for simulating the later upper-level ridge building in the central NP and resulting downstream weather pattern favorable for persistent precipitation in eastern NA. Significance Statement The 4–25 February 2019 extreme precipitation period was exceptionally persistent, contributing to extreme winter rainfall and flooding in the Ohio and Tennessee River valleys and unusually heavy snowfall to the north, and its onset was not well predicted. The period featured an anomalous, amplified, and persistent large-scale weather pattern favorable for extreme precipitation in eastern North America. Within eastern North America, precipitation was lighter in northern areas, while the precipitation was heavier at times and more convective in southern areas. Weather models’ lack of accurate simulation of the large-scale weather pattern over the North Pacific before the extreme precipitation period was a critical factor in the poor forecasts of the extreme precipitation period’s onset.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.477
Threshold uncertainty score0.872

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.218
Teacher spread0.202 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it