Noon Update: Storm Gets Going As Afternoon Wears On, Some Changes

The storm is now well underway for some and for others it has been sparse. The snow will pick up in all areas as the afternoon wears on and continue into this evening. However, this storm will not be as impact as feared last night. What that means is my final forecast issued yesterday morning (6-12") was more appropriate than my update last night (8-16").The result is many areas see between 6-12 inches not 8-16 inches of snow. Yes, there will be local amounts that still do go over 12".

So what happened? Despite the aggressive outputs from almost every model last night, the reality of the situation is the low pressure system is not going to wind up as tight as originally thought. We have a broad elongated trough. Below you can see the closed circulation at 18000 ft in the atmosphere (upper low) trend to be more off the coast...

This small change as projected and now as being observed will cause the heavier snow bands to be more east and even off shore. 

The current radar shows snow forming and this will fill in to moderate snow by the middle of this afternoon...

Again, this still will be a moderate to heavy snowstorm and the snow will not stop till late tonight.

So I jumped the gun last night and should have stuck with my original ideas on this storm. The models got way too over amped last night. 

Its March 21st and this still will be one of the more impressive late season storm but not anywhere close to storms like in March of 1958. 

I will have another update by mid afternoon to see how things are going.