00:00Well, there's been a lot of buzz about potential for snow in the Northeast, and a lot of this has
00:03been sparked by one computer model run.
00:06Just a single run of one particular model last Friday took off on social media, and the rumor mill has
00:13been pretty rampant.
00:14I think at this point in the game, most have learned that there's not going to be a significant winter
00:19storm this Thursday, Friday, early Saturday in the Northeast.
00:23But there will be, for some, your first wet snowflakes of the season if you're near or west of Interstate
00:3081.
00:31And again, it's not going to accumulate in most areas unless you have a couple thousand feet under your shoes
00:37and you're in higher elevation.
00:39So let's take a look at this here. I'm going to step into this with a few of our graphics,
00:43and then we'll look at some computer modeling.
00:45So here we are Thursday. As the storm system begins to move in, we're dealing with rain.
00:50It's just too warm for snow in advance of this.
00:54Here we are still going to be, this is Thursday, so it'll be the 12th of September, which is still,
00:59what, about 40 days before the beginning of at least astronomical winter.
01:03It's still very early. It's a mid-fall storm.
01:06But on the backside of this, we will get temperatures that are below the historical average.
01:10And Friday, here comes some wet snow building in on the backside of the storm.
01:14As precipitation tapers off, we will see some wet snowflakes, and on Friday night, we're going to be into it
01:19in some areas.
01:20And there is some high elevation locations. There are some high elevation locations where we're not mincing words,
01:26and it will be accumulating snow on Friday night.
01:29You can see the blue zones in parts of West Virginia.
01:32Some of the highest elevations of the Pocados, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the Green and White Mountains,
01:37even the Berkshires will see a little bit of snow in western Massachusetts, well west of Worcester,
01:42if you're looking for accumulating snow, and then up into northern parts of Maine.
01:46All right, let's look at what's going on.
01:49For colder air to be in place ahead of this, we would really want to see a strong area of
01:55high pressure
01:57over either eastern Ontario or western Quebec, and we really don't have that.
02:02And it's early in the season for this anyway.
02:03What we have is a fast-moving disturbance that's exiting, the one that's bringing some light rain and moderate rain
02:10for a time to northern New York and parts of Vermont, New Hampshire, and northern Maine on this Tuesday night.
02:15So there's not like a well-established fresh injection of cold air.
02:20We're in the 50s and 60s in advance of this system for most of the northeast.
02:23So that's, again, one strong argument right there that we're not going to see a significant winter storm.
02:29But on top of that, you'll notice that this next system comes in in kind of a fractured state.
02:35Here's one disturbance.
02:36Here's another that's a little bit more in phase, northern branch feature, southern branch of the jet stream.
02:42And they're working together here to some extent.
02:45But then there's another lobe of energy that comes in behind the first one.
02:48Here's another spoke of energy that's going to be rotating around this large area of low pressure.
02:53So what we're seeing is a deep trough that sets in.
02:56But these lobes of energy are kind of coming in phases, in spokes of energy, I should say.
03:02And it's not a fully cohesive storm system.
03:05It's coming in chunks.
03:06And it's not a big blockbuster storm by any stretch of the imagination.
03:09By Friday evening, Saturday morning, one bit of energy off the east side of the Gulf of Maine.
03:16Another one down over parts of the Outer Banks.
03:19And then another spoke of energy that'll be rotating on through, coming in from the western Great Lakes.
03:24So it just comes in phases.
03:26And because of that, we don't get tremendous lift in the atmosphere at any one point.
03:31So what's that look like here?
03:33Here comes the first one.
03:34And you can see it's pretty modest Thursday morning, Thursday afternoon.
03:37In fact, when the core of that storm system comes through, there are areas where we see very little precipitation.
03:43Look at the area around the Susquehanna Valley and all the way down to the Chesapeake and eastern Virginia.
03:48Here we have some down-sloping flow coming off the mountains.
03:52And that's the process that dries things out in the atmosphere.
03:55You're going to get some showers, but it doesn't even look like an inch of rain in Baltimore, for example.
04:00It looks like just a small fraction of that.
04:02So some showers of rain.
04:03And you'll notice that the storm system, it does begin to, we get a negative tilt in the trough here
04:10at times, for example, on Friday afternoon.
04:13But it's centered so far east by then that by Friday afternoon, most of the precipitation is near the New
04:19England coast or offshore.
04:21And even east of the latitude of New York, or the longitude of New York City, and pulling east of
04:25there.
04:26So, again, the main payoff from that and from the jet stream dynamics that will strengthen this will be out
04:32to the south of Rhode Island and just a little too far east.
04:35Now, it will get colder, and these subsequent lobes of energy that drop south through the western Great Lakes and
04:42spiral down into the mid-Atlantic,
04:43there are going to be additional pushes of colder air, so we're going to have some pretty nippy air out
04:49here for this time of the year.
04:51A big blast of cold will follow, but by the time the air gets really nippy out there, you can
04:57see that, and here's some cold flow,
04:59the precipitation is largely on the way out of here, if not gone.
05:02So, by temperature here, when most of the precipitation moves through Thursday afternoon, low to mid-50s in Philadelphia, near
05:1050 in New York, low 50s in Boston,
05:12it's still fall. This is a mid-to-late fall season storm.
05:16By Friday, most of the precipts out of here were on the way out, and we're going to get colder
05:21than freezing in the areas circled in red here with the blue shading.
05:25So, it's going to be a cold Saturday morning, and there will be some lingering precipitation.
05:29So, how much snow are we looking at?
05:30Well, most areas will see a coating of snow in the slightly higher elevations above, say, 1,500 feet in
05:38the interior.
05:38And if you're above 2,000 feet, you might expect to see half an inch to an inch, maybe a
05:43little more than that in some spots.
05:44You can see in areas near North Adams and western Massachusetts here, the GFS is hitting it, maybe three inches
05:50of snow,
05:51but not for Worcester, and certainly not for Boston. No snow in Boston.
05:56The Adirondacks will be a spot with some snow, and the Green and White Mountains will see some snow.
06:00And even into West Virginia, you can see that places near Elkins could see three or four inches of snow.
06:06So, our official forecast is, we have three shadings.
06:12In the lightest shading, a coating to an inch of snow.
06:15Usually, we begin with maybe one to three for the lightest shading, but I just want to make it clear.
06:20The lightest shading, less than an inch, is a coating to an inch of snow.
06:24Then the second shading here, we have one to three over the Catskills, one to three over the Laurel Highlands,
06:31one to three over the Berkshires and the Green Mountains, the White Mountains, one to three.
06:35You'll see more than that up on top of Mount Washington.
06:37We do expect to see three to six inches in the high peaks of the Adirondacks.
06:41So, there will be some snow coming in the high elevations of the interior,
06:45and some wet flakes here and there in the slightly lower elevations.
06:48We'll see you in the following.
06:48Here we go.
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