Snow has been in short supply for the resorts of the Northeast. The cycle has been cold air for snowmaking and then the storms tracking up to the Great Lakes bringing in warmer air and rain with cold air again behind the storms. That cycle will continue this week with the next storm for Wednesday moving up the Western side of the Appalachians putting the resorts on the warm side of the storm. Things will change however as we head into the Christmas weekend.
The storm on Wednesday may briefly start as snow and mixed precip as cold air will be in place, but will change over to rain during the day on Wednesday. Here is the rain/snow as of Wednesday afternoon up into Canada.
This storm was looking colder with a more Eastern track last week but has consistently shown up on the models the past few days taking the warmer track. The rain should change back to snow Thursday night as colder air works in, but most of the precip will be gone by then. This storm will however lead to a good change in the pattern.
The cold front will push off the East Coast behind the storm as the trough digs into the East bringing colder air. Then a series of storms will ridge up the Eastern side of the trough up the East Coast. The question is what track do they take? The first wave looks like it will quickly ride up the coast and out to sea off the coast of the NJ.
The second wave is the the most interesting as it looks like it will ridge further up the coast and could merge with a wave coming across the Great Lakes. This storm would push snow into the Northeast on Christmas Day. Right now the storm track is not certain but let’s look at the latest GFS forecast for the position of the storm on Sunday.
This track would take the storm off the coast of Nantucket and then out to sea. That would leave the heaviest snows in Southern VT & NH. If the storm can push bit further North before it heads East the snow would spread across more of the area. If this scenario were to verify it would bring 6-12 inches to the Southern half of VT & NH and 3-6 inches to the Northern Half. We could also pick up 3-6 inches across the Adirondacks of NY.
The GFS forecast model tends to have a bias to the East this far out so the storm may continue to shift further West and North which would be a snowier scenario. We will have to watch this storm over the next several day but it does look like a good chance of a white Christmas for the Green and White mountains.
The 3rd wave moves up the coast Monday and Tuesday. This storm is forecasted to track just far enough East to bring only light amounts of snow to most areas but again the models can bias East this far out so we will have to watch that wave as well. Let’s take a look at the progression of the snowcover over the weekend.
Here is the snowcover on Friday after the snow/rain/snow storm showing only a couple of inches at best on the ground.
Then lets look at the snowcover after the 3-12 inches falls on Christmas day across the region.
And then after the third wave on Tuesday, this one has a better shot of snow even down to the big cities. The lightest blue over NH would be the 1 foot with lesser amounts closer to 6 inches in the darker blue areas.
The cold looks like it will move in behind these storms with some chances of clipper systems bringing light snow later next week. Going into the first week of January it looks like we will return to more of the back and forth cold pattern with the storm track coming across the Northern half of the country and the lake before entering the Northeast. BA