For the second time in 6 days we have another nor’easter on the way for tomorrow afternoon and night. Thankfully this storm is moving much faster and our tides will not be astronomically high during the storm. With that said, the storm will have cold air to play with so heavy snow is a big ticket item for some of you. Some thoughts on the storm:
* Heaviest snow/rain is from about 4pm until 1am Thursday morning.
* Some thundersnow is possible tomorrow evening—if that occurs, 2-3″ of snow per hour
* Wed morning commute not affected but the evening commute greatly affected by heavy snow & rain
The pink shaded areas are where we have a Winter Storm Warning in effect and where we think the heaviest snow will fall. If you take a close look, you can see that Suffolk County and much of southeast MA does not have any warning or advisory…..those locations look like mainly rain (that means Boston sees rain, not snow). Like last night, the challenge with the storm is the rain/snow ribbon as it will be situated along and just west of I-95 (slightly west of where we thought it would be during last evening’s weathercasts):
if you live in that pink ribbon, chances are high that the snowfall forecast will be wrong as we simply don’t know tonight exactly who sees more rain than snow or vice versa. The green shaded area you can plan on 1-2″ of rain and in the white shaded region over 10″ is a good bet. Here are some zoomed in snowfall forecast maps for ya:
you notice how quickly the amount of snow is likely to change in just a few miles. Yikes. South of town, the forecast is a little easier as enough mild air should stream in off the ocean to keep snow limited…
In each of those blue shaded regions, the snow looks to be heavy & wet for shoveling and plowing. the added concern with that wet snow will be power disruption…some trees & power lines likely won’t be able to withstand the weight of that snow—-keep the mobile devices plugged in. Wind will also be an issue but thankfully not as strong as our storm last week. I do think for about 12-15 hours we will have some isolated gusts along the coast between 50-60 mph (a far cry from the 75-90 mph gusts we saw on Cape Cod last week)
Just inland, gusts between 40-50 mph are likely…..for this storm, the frequency of the strong wind gusts will also be lower. Some down trees are still likely tho as the ground will be saturated from yet another rainstorm (1-2″ likely) as well as the aforementioned heavy snow threat.
In terms of coastal flooding, the tides will be running about 1-2 feet lower than the astronomical tides from late last week and with a faster moving storm only 1 high tide cycle looks to be affected. Unfortunately, some minor to perhaps moderate coastal flooding is possible at the high tide early Thursday morning:
. Not great (Bob) but not as devastating as last week. Look for some improvement in the weather during Thursday and Friday but overall, still somewhat unsettled with lots of clouds and a smattering of light snow showers each day. Sunny and seasonable (mid 40s) for the weekend.
Spring is two weeks away.
~JR