Wow, what a storm we had for ourselves! Patriots are back in the Super Bowl and Southern New England is back to getting 2 foot snowstorms… reliving the glory days aren’t we? Although, I suspect there is a mix of opinions about the snow part of it. I digress.
Anyway, we wake up to a fresh 2-5″ of fluff that fell last evening, putting the icing of the giant snow cake. That pushed many towns and cities over the 20″ mark, including Boston and Worcester with snow totals of 23.2″ and 22.4″ respectively. That 23.2″ now marks the 8th largest single snowstorm on record for Boston and the 22.4″ puts it as the 9th biggest snow total for a Worcester snowstorm.
The snow is done with us for now this morning, but the cold is not. Area wide, it’s frigid, with temps in the single digits and lower teens. Factor in a breeze, and wind chills run sub zero.
Day in and day out, plan of temps near 20 in the afternoon and near 0 at night… through the rest of the week. Winds occasionally gust 15-25mph, but overall, it’ll be a solid winter sports week from cross country skiing, downhill skiing and tubing or just hitting the sledding hills with the kids. Dress warm and enjoy!
Ok, elephant in the room… we doing this again next weekend?
While I’m confident that a strong coastal storm will form just off the Carolina/mid-Atlantic coast, where it forms exactly and how it tracks after, will determine how much of an impact we see, and there’s lower confidence in that, this far out.
If the high over Canada is established far enough south and strong enough, it can suppress the storm south of us and not allow much of an impact here. However, if the low tracks just south of Nantucket, then it’s game on for a full on snow storm again, this time with even stronger winds/coastal flooding. Getting into the weeds of forecasting here, but you can see on this ensemble view (many different model simulations), there’s clustering of Ls (strong low pressure) just to our south, and then another group scattered well south and east and far enough away that precip wouldn’t make it in here.
Below is another model look about all those Ls you see. It’s about a 50/50 split in bringing in a major storm vs. not much at all. What you’re looking at is the liquid equivalent of precip that falls, you can see about half the model runs spiking up precip Sunday into Sunday night. If we do get hit, that would be the likely timeframe.
Plenty of time to watch this one, let’s get this past one cleaned up first. Give it a couple days, as as all these pieces of atmosphere energy scattered thousands of miles away, get clearer in detail and location, then details on how it’ll evolve for us will become clearer.