It's Christmas Eve! I hope all of you are with your families or are preparing to be with your families for tomorrow. It's the best day of the year!
Now, onto my Christmas gift. Our late weekend storm. Once again, this one is a forecasters nightmare. Now, I am not yet trained in the art of meteorology just yet, but I know enough to read some basic model maps and those models have been pretty much useless so far this winter.
This winter has been particularly difficult for all of our long range models to come into agreement on several systems. Why is this happening? I have no idea and no one does right now. I am sure the NWS will study this and give us an answer when it doesn't mean much to us.
For now, our sights should be set to the sky for Santa and then to the west and south for the beginnings of our storm. For snow lovers, you are hoping that the little piece of energy moving through the upper mid west "phases" or merges with the piece of energy over Texas that is the remnants of the last soaking storm to drench southern California.
This phasing is key. It will allow the northern jet stream and southern jet stream to merge and thus feed our storm some much needed moisture from the gulf AND tilt the upper level winds to a direction running parallel to the east coast.
The models have not come to any agreement on when if at all this phasing happens. It means everything to the track of the storm and the intensity. BUT we are starting to see a little bit of a trend. That trend brings heavy snow to SNE, overnight Sunday into early Monday. It misses the rest of the big east coast cities but nails the Boston area. QPF totals show a storm total of 0.75-1.25 inches spread over the area. Right now that would translate to a wide spread 6-12 inches with very gusty winds Sunday night.
This is likely to change. The next big model run is the GFS at 10:30. After that it is the EURO at 1am. Stay tuned!
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