Thursday: Next Storm Potential Is Early Next Week

 Good morning. I have been tracking a potential east coast storm for early next week. The period of focus is Tuesday and Wednesday. Now that we are within 5 days it is worth taking a look at things. As usual, we have the old fashioned battle between the American and European model in terms of how this storm develops. The American model keeps it south and the European has it hitting our area. I will discuss the reasons in more detail below. 

In general, this weather pattern is going to be very loaded second half of January as I have been discussing. 

Lets take a look...

Starting this weekend, a storm slides way to our south giving some regions a little snow as cold air is in place..

As this storm clears out cold air establishes itself across our area...

On Monday, a piece of energy from the pacific should start to amplify in the Gulf of Mexico causing a low pressure system to form. At this point in the forecast, I love seeing low pressure developing in the gulf with high pressure over the top...

From here is where things get complicated as the models differ on what happens with the track of this low.

The most bullish models, the Canadian and European track this low through the Tennessee valley into the northeast. The GFS is much more progressive and slides it off to the east. I show both below...

European...

GFS...

As usual we have the good old north vs south debate on the two major global models.

So lets take a closer look...

This storm threat all comes down to a few key features listed below...

Looking above the reason why the European model has a more north tracking robust storm system is how these features are aligned. The ridge amplification out west is strong which sharpens the "steering energy" and allows it to dive down from the north and pivot the "storm energy" from the gulf northeast. Due to the fact we have an atmospheric block in place, the storm is not able to just go out to sea and hits the eastern seaboard with snow. 

For a comparison, here is the GFS models same setup is much less amplified with these features. This means there is less opportunity for energy to consolidate and it results in a weather flatter solution. You can see below how chaotic the GFS is with the energy and how it is flatter overall...

All these pieces of energy are moving east too fast due to the flow not being amplified enough so the storm is weaker and flatter.

So what do I think will occur? It is hard to say today as both models are very good overall. I will say a long term bias of the GFS has always been to be too flat and progressive in the long range which is what you see above. However, the Europeans bias is to be too amplified. So there lies the problem.

Given we are still 5 days away I think we should get a clearer understanding of if this storm threat is to be taken seriously by tomorrow. I say this because the volatility in how the energy is handled should start to decrease. As an example, look how chaotic the GFS is from run to run handling the energy in the atmosphere for this period...

You can see how over last five model runs it has been struggling with the placement of those key features we discussed. This is why you can not lock into a solution at this time. 

Stay tuned, I will have another update tomorrow morning on how this is evolving.