December 15th 2024.

 

A surprise 2nd post this weekend... enjoy! 

Our approaching weak system is over the Ohio Valley, we have rain/mix moving across Western Pennsylvania into New York State, this system will move East, on it’s way toward the Northern Middle Atlantic, then track south of New England.

This will bring a rain, mix, snow event to a large part of the region. As far as impacts…

Central into part of Northeast Pennsylvania, could see 2-6 inches of snow

New York State, Northwest Massachusetts into parts of Southern into Central Vermont and New Hampshire will be on the cold side of the storm, so these areas in the higher elevations could see 1-3 inches of snow, with T-1 inch in the lower elevations and valleys. Northwest Connecticut could also see a T to less than an inch.

The National Weather Service (NWS) has issued Winter Weather Warnings and Winter Weather Advisories for Western Maryland and a large portion of Pennsylvania, part of Southeast New York State into Connecticut due to the possibility for freezing rain. Sleet and freezing rain Freezing rain will be an issue for Appalachians into the Laurel Highlands. Some of this ice will likely be heading into Northwest Pennsylvania and Finger Lakes, there looks to also be some freezing rain for southern and eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Most of Y’all across Northern New York State, Northern Vermont, Northern New Hampshire and Maine will stay dry; but there could be a few flurries at times

Eastern New England might only see a few sprinkles if anything

For Southeast Pennsylvania, Eastern Maryland, Delaware, most of New Jersey, Long Island and along the Coast this should be just a rain event.

A system quickly following this one, will pass up over the Great Lakes into Canada, this will drag a warm front across the region, warming us up Tuesday and Wednesday. Then another system will move through, which will drag back in cold air for Friday and over the Weekend.

Those looking for a snowstorm around Christmas

I talked about the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) the other day, and how it looks to move into the colder phases as we get into January. So I won't get back into that.

The Arctic Oscillation (AO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) are currently moving into positive phases; both of these look to stay positive this week into Christmas. This would setup a zonal (West to East) flow, which would suppress the trough, resulting in a quick parade of clipper type systems, a positive NAO would limit the chance for high latitude blocking, with a positive AO locking the cold air up over the Arctic. This isn’t the type of pattern that promotes major East Coast Snowstorms.

The sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and subsurface temperature anomalies in the Equatorial Pacific are below average so we look to be on the cusp of a weak La Nina, which would last through the winter. So far, this season has seen the Polar Vortex (PV) being very erratic with swings between a compressed PV and a stretched PV. Some of the analogues I used for this winter’s outlook, also had a similar behaving PV. But this year’s PV has been uncommonly quick with these changes. As we head into Christmas, the PV looks to keep a lot of the cold air locked up in the north, but once we get into January, we look to see more of these bouts of stretching or pieces of the PV breaking off. So, January should end up cold, maybe very cold.   

For the next 10 to 15 days, I just don’t see any major snowstorms, coming up the Coast. Instead, we’re going to be dealing with a series of Clippers bringing in light to at times moderate snow, these clippers will also keep the lake effect machine active. This patten is also the reason, I said in the outlook, parts of the I-95 corridor might end up with little to no snow this entire winter. We will see how things go!