Saturday Morning Update: Some Trends in Right Direction for Storm Development

Summary:

• Potential for big storm middle of next week
• Models do NOT currently show a storm impacting the region but show one close enough to watch
• Recent trends have moved west but we still would need to see further corrections for impacts
• Given this is still over 100 hours away it is worth watching
• I assign a 50% probability of impacts at this time
• Stay tuned

Good morning. A nice dusting of snow is currently on the ground with flakes still flying. With temperatures at 15 degrees at least it feels like winter. 

So about that storm I discussed yesterday for middle of next week. Well if you remember I put this image up...

The focus was to pull back the trough (blue)  off the west coast which would help the developing storm in the east to trend west. 

Here are the latest model trends with that....

You can see as of now there is a trend to pull that back more west in the last 24 hrs. The result is the storm now being projected closer to the coast albeit we still need further trends...

I'll tell you one thing though, what ever ends up developing will be a bomb. All three jet streams are in play here...

Looking at the model ensembles (main weather model with inputs adjusted and rerun multiple times to test for potential error) you can see the strength of some of the low pressure centers...

The numbers represent low locations and their strength. Notice the sub 960 lows on some of these! Also notice the western spread of the lows. This can mean (isn't always the case) that this can trend more west. 


So the bottom line is this, we got some big time potential to track for middle of next week. Recent trends have gone towards a storm closer to the coast, but we still need more shifts west for impacts. At this time I assign a 50% probability for a big storm to impact somewhere along the east coast Wednesday and Thursday.

Stay tuned!