Wednesday Weather Update: Weekend Storm Still Bears Watching Along With Next Week

Summary:

• Cold air arriving in the region now
• This stays locked in for most of December
• I still maintain my view that the weekend (Saturday) storm system stays off shore
• There is some outside data however that suggests this storm can track closer to the coast than expected
• We will monitor the evolution of this closely next 2 days
• The middle of next week still looks very interesting for a bigger storm to develop
• This looks to be a late developing storm which would favor New England over the Mid Atlantic
• Should have more clarity on this by the weekend
• Many updates to come

Good morning. As we speak, our pattern change is underway and cold air in moving into the region....

Temperatures will stay in the low 40's today then hover in the 30's for highs the rest of the week. As I mentioned, this pattern of colder air stays locked in for most of December.

Now on to chances for snow. I mentioned on Monday there were two periods to watch, this weekend and the middle of next week. I explained how I was not that bullish on the chances for anything notable this weekend and how the middle of next week looked like it had a better chance. So where do we stand now?

The weekend storm system does look like it stays off shore but there are a few factors I am watching closely. There are a few model outliers that try to take this system closer to the coast. Although they may be outliers now, experience tells me over the next 24 hours we need to watch the evolution of this to make sure they stay outliers.

For example the major model suites of the GFS and European follow my thoughts that this stays off shore Saturday....

GFS

Euro

The Canadian model however says not so fast and brings impacts to the region...

This is not a very good model in my opinion but what has my attention is twofold. For one, a much better model the UKMET brings this system closer to the coast...

And two, a few individual ensemble members of the GFS model show the closer to the coast solution as seen by the snowfall output for each member...

So what will this all come down to? Well the upper air energy of course. The reason the Canadian model is closer to the coast than the GFS is it has more consolidated energy which is partly due to a stronger western Atlantic high pressure system...

This causes more consolidation of the energy. as that ridge in the atlantic pushes everything in seen below..

Compare that to the flatter GFS....

To be clear I still maintain my view that this at the very best just scrapes the coast with some light snow showers. However, based on some of this fringe data above we need to watch this closely the next 36 hours. I will be updating you on the evolution of this.

From here we need to focus on middle of next week for a late developing storm system...

I will go into more detail on the evolution of this in the coming days, but I like the set up here and this can end up being a bigger storm for New England (these late developers tend to favor New England). The reason I have been discussing this threat is I like what I see in the upper air set up. More to come on this.

Stay tuned, I will have an update tonight if the data today moves towards the fringe solutions for Saturday.