Monday Morning: Close, But No Cigar?

Good morning. As a major snowstorm currently bears down on Maine the natural question is will a big one hit our region? The ironic thing is we have a set up this week that can support a major storm but it does not look like it wants to come together properly.

Before we get there, lets look at current radar over Maine..

You can see bands of heavy snow over the state. We should see a lot of snow amounts close to 2 feet near the coast. In Mass and surrounding areas over a foot was reported in many areas. Not bad at all!

So moving on, we have a very interesting set up this week in the weather pattern. Two main things to focus on: Energy moving in from the SW corner of the United States and energy diving down from Canada. I highlighted these features below..

Now in addition to these two pieces of energy, notice the ridging of high pressure over the west coast, ridging of high pressure over Greenland and a vortex of low pressure over northeastern Canada. All off these ingredients are in the recipe for a major east coast storm. If everything aligned properly, and those two pieces of energy combined along the east then the storm blows up. However, just because the ingredients are there does not mean a storm. It has to come together properly and right now that does not look to be the case. 

The timing of the two is off as labeled below..

This results in an offshore strung out wave of low pressure..

Now can this change? Yes, it can. I have been watching this very closely for several days and although it has trended better it is still not there. By tomorrow morning we will know for sure the fate of this storm threat but at this time I say its a 25% chance. We need to see major trends in next 24 hrs from models. They need to speed up #2 and slow down #1. Considering the departing storm over Maine currently can play a role in this, it is not out of the question. We need to see how the models handle the departure of that storm.  Stay tuned for updates on this.

Following this near miss, things then warm up next week before maybe one last gasp of winter around the last 5 days of Feb. The season is ageing guys and if it doesn't snow again soon most areas will stay below normal for the year.

Thats all for now, more to come.