Wednesday Morning: Loosing Confidence for Weekend Storm, Light Snow Friday

Good morning everyone. As you are aware by now I am/was tracking the potential for a coastal storm this weekend. From the weekend I told everyone that this is pure speculation until we saw the "players" come on the field. Well today is Wednesday and those players (upper air disturbances) are getting close to the field and I do not see the overall trend I am looking for. The towel is in my hand but I will wait till tonight until I throw it in. 

To start off, it looks like we can see some light snow on the arctic front Friday morning This is better than nothing and most models are trying to show this below..

Expect 1 possibly 2 inches of accumulation as this will be a very high ratio snow because of the arctic air. *It will be very cold tomorrow through the weekend.*

Then the main target period approaches and right now I only have one model (the European and its ensembles) trying to support my storm idea for Saturday, although it even still has some work to do.

Most models continue keep the 2nd and larger storm threat out to sea..

The European and its ensembles are more impressed and bring this closer to the coast..

Why the difference? Well like I have talked about it all comes down to the upper air energy guiding the storm at the surface..

The below image taken from the GFS explains it again..

You can see how the approaching disturbance in the northern jet stream must be very sharp and dive into the lakes hard. If that happened then the 2nd disturbance associated with the southern jet stream would respond and hug the coast closer. Right now, the gfs is not sharp enough with the northern disturbance and it allows the 2nd disturbance to round the bend wide right resulting in an offshore storm at the surface.

It would not take much to change this but regardless I do not like the lack of trending on the major models. A few European ensemble members have a big storm but that is not nearly enough to make a case. It is for this reason that the towel is in my hand and I will likely throw it in by tonight or tomorrow morning once I get a little more data.

Stay tuned.