Good evening everybody, well color me excited! My inner 10 year old is getting all giddy inside.
I get that some people hate this kind of weather, but for me personally, I didn’t have the happiest upbringing, let’s put it that way, and boy when it snowed, I would stare out the window and feel the deepest feeling of peacefulness come over me.
I still have it to this day, so you’ll have to indulge my youthful exuberance over our incoming white crystalline dendrite Bacchanal, because it looks it’s going to snow, and snow hard at times!
Ok, let’s jump in, I am going to use caps to create sub-sections to try and break this all up for you.
If all you care about is amounts, scroll down and find the subsection names, and read the sections you are interested in, or read the whole book if you’re so inclined.
Did I mention it’s going to snow?
COLD AIR SETS THE TABLE
For tonight, very cold and dry air is going to settle into the region from northwest to southeast as high pressure begins to crest eastward into Quebec Province to our north-northwest.
Although we have some gusts in the Berkshires hitting 15-20mph, winds should slacken with time, and with partly clear skies, temps should drop into the single digits to very low teens.
This will provide a perfectly cold air mass for our storm to ram into tomorrow night and through Thursday morning, which will produce a serious snow thump (more on that later).
For Wednesday, our strong high pressure to the north will continue to slowly track northeast. We’ll start off with partly sunny skies, but that classic snow sky will overspread the region into the afternoon, with a high cirrus cloud deck building in, muting the Sun, and then the mid-level clouds will arrive and obscure our star’s disk, and I will smile like a Cheshire Cat (in Cheshire County?).
Oh yeah, highs will only be in the low to mid 20s with a light north wind veering around to the east, and then picking up at night out of the east and northeast. Lows Wednesday night will only be in the teens. Again, no mix line in MA, VT, NH and most of northern CT with this one (though now northeast CT may see a period of sleet in southern Tolland/Windham Counties).
STORM SETUP/WHAT CHANGED
Our low center will track tomorrow through the Tennessee Valley and then track northeast off of the Mid-Atlantic coastline somewhere between Delaware and central New Jersey.
The change for this more northerly exit off the coast (and the corresponding spread of heavier snows further north in our region) is due to the expected track of yesterday’s low east of Newfoundland to be more easterly and get out of the way of our high pressure to the north, allowing IT to bob north a bit more.
In addition, as our storm tracks east, a piece of energy will dive south through the western Great Lakes and help our storm to pivot a bit more northerly than easterly, bringing the mid-level 700mb low center closer to us.
EDUCATION TIME: MORE THAN ONE LOW CENTER
When we talk about low pressure centers, most weather folks are referring to the low center at the surface of the Earth.
However, a low pressure system is a VERTICAL system, several miles high up into our Troposphere.
Given this, there are numerous low centers at different elevations, and they tend to be at different longitude/latitude points on the Earth grid, when compared to the surface low (if you’ve ever heard of “stacked low pressure” that refers to when a low is very intense and all of its centers more or less align from surface to sky, which won’t be the case with this storm).
Getting even more nerdy, because millibars are units of atmospheric pressure, AND because common levels of equal pressure tend to exist at certain altitudes/elevations (or “heights”) above our heads, these common heights at which we observe upper low centers are broken down into 300mb (6 miles up), 500mb (3.5 miles up), 700mb (2 miles up), 850mb (1 mile up), and 925mb (half a mile up).
REMEMBER THAT 700MB LOW?
Getting even MORE nerdy, if you want heavy snow, you want to be northwest of the 700mb low center, and today’s guidance is bringing that closed off 700mb low right over Long Island and southern CT, which puts northern CT and WMass/CMass right in the sweet spot for heavy snowfall.
GETTING BACK TO REALITY: WHEN DOES IT START?
As our storm tracks into our region, we should see snow break out in areas like eastern NY, northwest CT and the Berkshires by 8-9pm, and then that will overspread northeast thorughout the rest of the region through the midnight hour, even in Worcester County and southwest NH.
HIGH SNOWFALL RATES
This is going to be a powdery snow, and it will accumulate readily, and immediately on ALL surfaces, including roads tomorrow night into the pre-dawn hours of Thursday morning given the super cold air mass that will precede this storm.
Not only will it start accumulating quickly and cause driving conditions to go downhill quickly, but it is going to THUMP at times, with snowfall rates of 1-2″ per hour, through the pre-dawn hours, when the bulk of our snow will fall.
WIND/VISIBILITY
With a strong high to the north, our fairly weak but moisture-laden storm system will combine to generate northeast wind gusts of 20-30mph at times tomorrow night, so the snow will be blowing, drifting, and causing low visibility at times. Some areas could even see brief whiteout conditions, though winds are not expected to be strong enough to produce blizzard conditions.
OUTAGES ARE DOUBTFUL
This snow is going to be light and shouldn’t take out many power lines, though a few hilltown areas along the east slopes of the Berkshires could see some isolated outages if a wind gust gets up to 40mph out of the northeast.
Snow will fall at varying intensities through Thursday morning and should taper off by early to mid afternoon from west to east. Highs w
SNOWFALL AMOUNTS
I am upping my amounts to a widespread 8-14″ from northern CT, north through all of WMass and CMass, up to about the level of the Rt. 2 corridor, with more like 6-10″ north of there into SVT and SWNH, with possibly 3-6″ in the northern parts of Bennington, Windham and Cheshire Counties.
This is because we still have a very strong high to the north (albeit expected to relent more willingly to our incoming storm), and so somewhere in VT/NH (be it southern or central areas) a sharp northern cutoff will take place as drier air east away at the northern part of the snow shield.
On the upside, we could see some 14″+ amounts in northwest CT up into the southeastern Berkshires and into the southwestern hilltowns of Hampden and Hampshire Counties.
BUST POTENTIAL
The bust potential to the downside with this system is if the high pressure doesn’t follow today’s trends and consensus and the low dewpoint air mass doesn’t give way, allowing for lower snow totals further south into WMass and CMass.
Also, with heavy snow bands over our region, we all know that what goes up must come down. This means somewhere we’ll get rising air with heavy snow and just north or south of it, we’ll get sinking air (a/k/a subsidence) which will produce lighter snows. This is why there is always a range of totals provided.
As for upside bust potential (meaning more snow than I am now expecting), I doubt it because A) the storm isn’t going to be that strong and B) it is going to be a fairly fast mover and should keep on trucking east and out of here, so there is only so much time it will be precipitating.
I NEED A NAP
Ok folks, that about does it for tonight, I will try to answer any questions you might have, and tomorrow I will be posting a morning report, noon-ish report, and evening report, along with a late night report, and will be covering the storm all day Thursday until it’s out of here.
Snow is comin’, ayup!!! Please let other folks know about this upcoming winter weather event, and as always thanks for reading and for referring others to my page, and if you’re new here, welcome! And thanks for being awesome.
Stay tuned, my friends!