Good morning everybody, we’ve got temps below freezing out there with plenty of fog around, hopefully you saw my 6:45am update.
This will break up as the morning wears on. We’ve got a cold front tracking southeast out of NY that appears to wash its moisture out over the NY/MA-VT border, so some snow showers are possible in the northern Berkshires into SVT.
Otherwise, we should start to see partly sunny skies developing east of the Berkshires this afternoon, with highs rising into the 35-40º range, which will continue some snow melt, albeit modest given the low Solstice-y sun angle and lack of daylight hours.
For tonight, temps will drop behind the front, getting down into the upper teens to low 20s.
For Wednesday, a ribbon of high pressure works into the region, and should produce partly sunny skies over the high terrain west of I-91, and mostly sunny skies elsewhere with highs in the mid to upper 30s. Clouds will increase at night, and lows will drop into the upper 20s.
CHRISTMAS EVE/DAY
Clouds continue to thicken and lower on Thursday as southerly flow builds, which will allow temps to rise into the low 50s.
This is due to a combination of high pressure being east of us, and developing low pressure tracking northeast through the western Great Lakes, well northwest of us.
We get caught in the southerly siphon in the middle, which will draw northward heavy rainfall and wind energy.
The concern is for how mild temps will become in the region late Thursday afternoon and night as a strong low level jet streak pushes overhead about half a mile to a mile aloft. Winds would be blowing 70-100mph up there, and some of that mixes down, we could have power outage issues and wind damage problems.
This, obviously, would cause a big problem for folks who are celebrating Christmas.
In the coming days (and if you don’t have a generator) it might be prudent to start thinking of some foods you could make ahead of time in case you get caught in an outage and have plans.
The bottom line is that rain will pick up in intensity Thursday overnight, and it will come down hard at times, pretty much evaporating our snow pack. The combo of melt water and falling water will result in messy road ways, possible clogged drains, and some street flooding, along with possible basement flooding, if the worst comes to pass with this rain event.
Hopefully, some recent signals of a more west to east component pushing this thing through a big quicker would help cut down on total time it is raining, and reduce rainfall amounts. We shall see.
After rain on Christmas morning, the afternoon should “improve”, although that may mean some folks in the Berkshires, Litchfields, Taconics, western hilltowns seeing a brief change to snow showers, along with a flash freeze at night, as temps plummet into the teens after highs in the 45-50º range.
We have a cold weekend ahead, and then two more storm chances next week, which we’ll refine as we get closer.
Let’s see how this system affects the streamflows which will help clarify what comes after it moves through.
Have a great day!