Ice and Rain Wednesday but is potential snow just a week away ?

No good news regarding our potentially wet and rainy Wednesday. Models have actually moved the track of this storm farther north the last few days and the result will be a shorter period of ice and a longer period of rain. The freezing rain should begin around daybreak and change to plain rain within a few hours. Temperatures will inch close to the 40 degree mark later in the day. It's about half an inch of liquid precipitation in total and most of it should be over by the evening. By late Thursday morning most of the mountain should be back below freezing and down into the teens by Friday morning.


A much more productive weather pattern takes over as advertised on Friday. Models have been hinting at varying degrees cold and storminess in the 10 day stretch beginning on Friday but I expect it to be one of the better weeks for snow this season. The first new snow comes Saturday from a weaker clipper system. There were a few indications that this storm might ultimately become more than a weak clipper off the Atlantic coast but those indications have gone away as of Monday morning.

What has been relatively consistent is the indications of a much more organized precipitation producer in the Tuesday the 9th/Wednesday the 10th time frame. Lot of polar jet energy will diving south out of Canada fueling the potential rise of a big east coast system. There are phasing questions relating to this system but it would be hard to doubt the presence of southern branch jet energy and moisture. Potential phasing is a question of timing and the relative positions of both colliding branches of the jet. I put the chances of something rather significant happening pretty high (65 %) given the proximity of the two disturbances in question. It's just a matter of "when" and what the evolving storm will do as a result of the "when" question.

Terrain enhanced powder from any such midweek storm would continue into Thursday as a blast of cold air envelops New England. The cold should continue to dominate through the President's Day holiday and there are indications that yet another storm could bring its potential snowfall to the mountain in that time frame. The cold may recede somewhat during the week following President's Day as PNA support for colder weather vanishes. The AO should remain at least weekly negative thwarting any potential big thaw.