This was supposed to post yesterday, but somehow got stuck in the queue — therefore here’s an early morning blog for your wintry Thursday.
This morning, we are watching another storm system come through the area with mixed precipitation. Reports of freezing rain are coming in from the Berkshires, the southern Adirondacks and Green Mountains. Eventually, this will mix into portions of central New Hampshire and Maine, but northern areas may stick it out as all snow.
All eyes then turn on the next storm, which will be arriving later Saturday into Sunday. For a while, I’ve been talking about the mixed signals coming out of the European model, and how it honestly just didn’t make sense given the teleconnections of a negative AO/NAO. Also, a mass freezing rain setup typically comes from a stalled boundary or front, not from a low moving up the coast.
However, often times we have to wait for one storm to come to fruition, or even pass, before the next storm is captured fully by a model. After 3 to 4 solid days of the European model showing an intense freezing rain set up, which made little sense, it has finally shifted in the 0Z run last night to looking more like the GFS in Canadian models.
Image is the Euro at 0Z on the left, and Euro at 12Z yesterday on the right. This should adjust even a bit more.
It’s hard to say that one model handles things better than another, but I do believe that the Canadian has been handling this pattern very well, the GFS was a bit cold for today’s storm while the Euro was a bit warm for today’s storm for many days, and they all converged on more of the consensus of the Canadian.
Beyond the debate of model accuracy and reliability, we nonetheless have a major system for the end of the weekend. We’ll still deal with the mixed precipitation component of the storm, however, it looks a lot less substantial for areas in central New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Areas south of that will still be dealing with sleet, potentially substantial freezing rain, or even rain into the Catskills and Mid-Atlantic. As cold air wraps back in, everything will likely change back to snow briefly before the system moves out Monday morning. We are talking easy double digit numbers for areas that do not mix.
Behind the system, as it is one of the larger ones we’ve contended with this season, wind will be substantial. I anticipate wind impacts Monday through Wednesday morning as deep cold settles into the region for vacation week. There is still a storm signal for February 21… but we will see how that plays out with the intense cold.