Good evening everybody, I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news around this late week period, especially in this crap year of 2020 we’ve been stumbling through together, but I need to get the word and alert out to you to continue to stay tuned to this developing weather situation.
We’re still 3 days away, but high wind signals continue to be output, along with heavy rain, anomalously mild temperatures, dense fog, and street flooding potential as rapid snowmelt combines with heavy rain and strong gusty southerly winds Christmas Eve into Christmas morning.
Santa is likely going to need you to scrap the milk and cookies and put out some extra whiskey nips to get him and his reindeer through this crappy, rainy, windy fog slog.
TONIGHT THROUGH WEDNESDAY NIGHT
Colder air works in tonight behind a frontal passage that brought a wind shift this afternoon out of the west and northwest, and gusts over 20mph are possible with lows in the upper teens to low 20s. A mountain flurry can’t be ruled out.
For tomorrow, high pressure builds in, winds slacken, and we should see partial sunshine with highs in the mid to upper 30s. Lows will be in the 20s as clouds increase.
Tomorrow evening will be the last decent viewing of the departing planetary conjunction, methinks.
CHRISTMAS EVE
A powerful storm will wind up over the center of the country and track northeast through Lake Superior and into southern Canada.
As this happens, our Wednesday high pressure cell will strengthen into a 1032mb surface high, and kick east into the western Atlantic.
These two synergistic forces will cause southerly flow to strengthen big time, pulling up tropical air (both in terms of temperature and moisture content) straight from the tropics, and into New England Thursday, Thursday night and Friday morning.
Thursday will be mostly cloudy with highs in the low 50s, as snow begins to melt more rapidly. Showers arrive by late afternoon, and build in number and intensity during Christmas Eve.
Christmas Eve, quite frankly, looks just awful.
Heavier rain showers will be moving into the region and combining with very mild temps to not only melt the snowpack more rapidly causing some street flooding to develop with clogged drains flooding road ways, but dense fog will be developing as high dewpoints advect over that cold snow pack.
So, visibility will be poor, there will be big, deeper puddles in road ways, snow melt will be starting to pour into streams, with flash flooding possible in spots by the later pre-dawn hours into early Christmas morning, and southerly and southeasterly winds will start to gust over 40mph at night.
BE PREPARED
Folks, if you are having people over or are gathering in any way, you need to attend to any loose or unsecured objects in your yards so they don’t blow around, as well as start to think about re-configuring how you’d handle your food preparations in case outages do come to pass.
You will want to charge all of your devices on Thursday before the evening arrives, and give yourself extra time traveling Christmas eve due to the expected lowered visibilities.
CHRISTMAS DAY
By Christmas morning, southerly winds could be blowing 40-60mph in gusts, causing scattered power outages, and while we’re at it, a couple of thunderstorms are possible, too.
Christmas Day is going to be warm, 55-60º, and very rainy and windy before noon, but hopefully after that the front will pass through, and while temps will start to drop, at least the heaviest rain and wind will be to the east of us.
Later on Christmas night, temps will drop into the teens, so any standing water will freeze solid.
STAY TUNED
Anyway, this is what I am looking at it, personally I think it SUCKS, but my job is to keep you updated, aware, and alerted to impacts to your plans, lives, property, etc., so considered yourself updated.
Hopefully some of these higher impact potentials don’t come to pass or change in the coming days, but we’re close enough that I needed to warn you of what we might all be enduring Thursday night into Friday.
Have a good night, and I will keep you updated all the way through this upcoming storm system…