Weather will become the big story starting this afternoon and continuing all the way through Monday afternoon. This morning isn’t bad, in fact it’s pretty nice. Temperatures will climb to the low 40s for a lot of us today with a fair amount of clouds. Winds are pretty light early this morning but they’ll crank later today, especially this evening and overnight.
Get used to the wind. It’s going to be the theme of our forecast through Tuesday. I know the graphic below only shows through Monday, but the wind is still going to be here on Tuesday.
- Today (Friday): Strong gusty winds (more on that below) for everyone. However, those of us on the coastline and especially on the Cape and Islands will likely see some pockets of wind damage and power outages.
- Saturday: Wind on Saturday is below the damaging threshold but it’s still gusty, still noticeable, and will drive wind chills down to dangerous levels (also more on that below).
- Sunday: Sunday is our one break from the wind so enjoy it!
- Monday: Wind cranks back up with our next storm moving in. Wind will be especially strong Monday morning and could again be damaging on the coast.
- Tuesday: Much like Saturday, Tuesday will not feature damaging winds but a gusty cold wind will again make Tuesday feel pretty blustery.
Ok so we’ll break this down day by day starting now and going through Monday.
TODAY (FRIDAY):
For most of us it is a cloudy and windy day. However those of us on the Cape and up to about Plymouth Bay will have rain showers this morning before transitioning to snow showers this afternoon. Don’t expect anything more of than coating of snow as the storm passes by offshore, and that threat for any snow accumulation is only on the Cape. As I said earlier, wind will crank up later today as well. You’ll see on the screenshots of the future radar, I took temperatures off and put sustained wind on.
As of the writing of this blog (6am) rain has moved onto parts of the Cape and Nantucket. It will fill in for more of us there between now and noon and stay as rain for a few hours. Notice above at 4pm we change the rain over to snow showers. It will stay as snow showers between about 4 and 8pm before totally clearing the Cape by 9pm tonight. The rain will be changing to snow as cold air rushes in. As that happens, that’s when the winds will engage. We have wind advisories and high wind warnings in effect for today thru early Saturday for potentially damaging wind. Any damage and power outage threat will be isolated in the wind advisory (tan) and more scattered in the high wind warning (gold).
While the above future radar and wind screen grabs show sustained winds, wind gusts will be higher. Peak wind gusts this evening and tonight will shake out like this:
SATURDAY:
Saturday is bitter cold. In fact, Saturday is dangerously cold. A wind chill advisory is in place for everyone starting Friday night and through much of the day on Saturday. Most of Saturday will have subzero feels like temperatures, but it’s Saturday morning that’s especially cold with wind chills near -20° in spots. In those conditions, frostbite can set in to exposed skin in 30 minutes. If you’re heading west for the weekend, western Mass has a wind chill warning where wind chills could fall to -30°. That would lead to frostbite in just 10-15 minutes.
Here’s the wind chill timeline starting tonight at 8pm and continuing through Sunday morning. Wind chills drop to the teens this evening and then teens to 20 below tomorrow morning. I don’t think we’ll make it to 0 for a wind chill Saturday afternoon. Sunday morning is still cold but as winds back down the wind chill won’t be AS bad. That said, some of us will still drop below zero Sunday morning.
SUNDAY:
Sunday is our one “nice” day. Now, that said it’s still going to be cool and still below average but we gotta take what we can get. Wind will back down dramatically so the 27 degree temperatures will feel pretty close to that. And we’ll keep the sunny skies around.
MONDAY:
We’re still watching our next storm on the way for Monday, and really gets going overnight after midnight Sunday night/early Monday. The trend has been pretty consistent and models become more in agreement that this storm will take an inland track which means it’s a “warmer” storm for us. Of course a warmer storm means less in terms of snow. If this took a more offshore track, we’d be colder and we’d be in line for a significant snow. With this track, the heavy snow will set up in New York State and Northern New England/Ski Country. That’s not all bad news! Ski Country desperately needs snow. For us it’s more of a messy mix set up. That said, we’ll still see some snow! But as it mixes with rain and sleet it will cut back on numbers quite a bit.
As I said at the beginning of the blog, we’ll also have to watch the potential of damaging wind coming in as well Sunday night/Monday morning especially for those on the coastline. Once we get within 48 hours of the storm (so Saturday morning), we’ll get a much better picture of the storm. At that point we can start talking wind gust forecast, rainfall amounts, and maybe most importantly for a lot of us, snowfall amounts.