After last week's record breaking high temperatures , one more breath of winter will arrive just in time for this weekend. A low pressure currently departing and an incoming high pressure will funnel in colder air on Friday as a cold front sags southward through the Northeast, which will bring rain, along with a few mixed snow showers overnight. By Saturday morning, temperatures will be below average for the first time in days! This will help set the stage for winter to make one of its final pushes Sunday into Monday.
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(Saturday morning low temeratures via the North American Model. Image courtesy of TropicalTidbits.)
Going back as far as last week, our WinterRisk™ highlighted this weekend as an area of concern for winter weather and Thursday helped increase our confidence and confirm our wintry threat. A mature area of low pressure well up in the atmosphere will develop over the Great Plains on Saturday. This will then roll eastward as energy dips into the the Deep South. A surface low pressure then will come out of the Deep South and move off the Virginia/north Carolina coast sometime Saturday night and into Sunday morning. This is then where two schools of thought kick in. The first idea is that a low pressure moves more east off the coast and makes its closest pass just southeast of Cape Cod Sunday into Monday. The second solution would be one that moves more north up the East Coast, making a landfall in or around Rhode Island Sunday into Monday. Regardless, Sunday afternoon into early Monday will be our time frame for snow and rain, ending just in time for the AM commute on Monday everywhere except for eastern New England.
Being 48-60 hours out, we are now getting close to the point to when we can pick out what will happen in terms of snow totals with each track. If we have an eastern track, more places would see snow, but it would be lighter in intensity, making it tougher to accumulate. The exception would be New England, though, where a heavy snow band can set up and bring hours of accumulating snow. A track closer to the coast would bring more of a rain event for eastern New England. However, the NYC Metropolitan area on south would have more precipitation. A classic I-95 set up would be the case here, where those east of I-95 would see more in the way of rain, with the heavier snows in eastern Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey.
(Thursday Afternoon European model. GIF courtesy of StormVistaWxModels.com.)
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