Weekend Update: The Jury is Out

To be blunt, and I regret to say it for those of you who love snow but it is going to rain this week. I always knew this  would be a borderline event as seen in my last posts saying the areas that had a shot at snow would be our most western counties but the models have converged on even a warmer solution. What did us in was the lack of cold air in place ahead of this approaching storm. Instead we had to rely on a perfect track (one where the storm had to manufacture its own cold air by setting up in the perfect spot) along with the high pressure in eastern Canada setting up in a precise location to allow this storm to form off shore. None of the two materialized which was surprising to me for a few reasons. 1. We knew a pattern shift was taking place next week. 2. All the fall storms did not run inland and instead formed along coast (two snow events in Nov) and 3. There was a storm in December of 1969 (dumped 10 inches in our area) that on Thursday night appeared to have the exact same upper air pattern as what the models were showing at that time for next week. Friday morning came and all the models backed off, converging on a warmer inland track for this storm. So you can say although I tried to make a bold statement 6 days out I ended up falling short of my forecast which is going to happen sometimes. But I rather be wrong and stick to a overall forecast idea, then switch my forecast with every run of the modeling just to say at the end I nailed it. That is not the purpose of this blog.

So whats ahead after this washout this week? Well first a very strong storm will form end of next week but looks like it wants to give inland areas a chance at heavy snow and not our area. I will monitor this and early next week will post on what I believe will happen and if we will see any frozen precip. 

Beyond next week this pattern still will produce storms through January so activity in the atmosphere will not be the problem. We just need cold air in place ahead of one of these systems or the block to the north to be a a perfect spot to not allow the initial surface lows to charge into the great lakes and instead suppress them further south allowing them to reform along the mid Atlantic coast with more cold air in place. According to the modeling, the cold air should be there as seen below...

source:weatherbell.com

Stay patient, we missed out this time but the party is not over. We still can see snow on the ground (over 3 inches) before Christmas and if not shortly after. I will comment more on Monday.