Thursday Morning Storm Update: Had to Make a Realistic Forecast

There it is guys the final map. As you all can see I made some adjustments.  Lets go through a few points here.

1. The storm will develop to be very strong with a low pressure center below 980.

2. Big problem is the sharp cutoff in moisture on the western side of this storm. The brown colors are dry air..

3. I have talked about no high to the north of the storm and now its really going to become a issue based on the latest model guidance which I can not ignore. Look at how much warm air surges into the mid levels of the atmosphere by 1 pm Sat below. This causes snow to change to sleet and plain rain in some areas. The problem is that is when a bulk of the precipitation will fall.

4. Areas where it should stay all snow are limited in how much precipitation or moisture falls out of the sky. This make there a small area where I expect 3-6 inches of snow.

5. What you are left with is a storm that is not going to be as significant as I expected. I think its very important to be honest and not try to slowly shuffle out of a bad initial forecast. I think you guys saw I always expected mixing and mentioned the warm air being an issue due to no high pressure to the north in my videos. However, I did not expect the warm air to dominate areas to the north west as much as its being shown. I also thought the storm would carry more moisture  on the western side thus having a longer period of snow. 

6. What you are left with is my initial area of 6+ of snow(the blue region on my old map) being reduced to 3-6 and that 3-6 being pushed to the north west. The mixing line was expanded further to the northwest as well. Maybe i'm being too hard on myself but I am not going to pretend that was the forecast from the start I def expected some higher amounts. At least I waited till today to have an accumulation map. 

I am a little disappointed I didn't have better foresight to weight some of these factors a little more. However the goal of this blog will always be to take a stance and that means a initial forecast has to be made before the day of a projected storm. Otherwise anyone can go to the National Weather Service web site and watch the forecasts change by the hour. So yes it means I will be wrong at times- hopefully I end up being right more than I am wrong.

Yes of course things can still change since we are still 48hrs away. I will keep everyone updated. Thanks for all the new followers and for checking in. Assuming things don't shift back to a snowier scenario in the next 48 hours hopefully I can do a little better with the initial forecast next time. 

We have another shot at snow early next week and I will start to focus on that as the days go on.