Obviously, for those of us in the immediate central New York area, a taste of real winter has settled in with one to two feet of snow being recorded in the past couple of days. Guess we're making up for our snowless November. It's almost like Mother Nature flipped the light (or the weather) switch on last Wednesday when it turned December. We went from a soaking rain with flooding to snow within 24 hours, and the snow has really picked up since Sunday, thanks to added moisture from an intense storm parked over northern Maine.
None of this is any big surprise as we talked about this last week. Much colder air on the way, and an intensifying storm over Maine would likely enhance the lake effect snows over us in CNY. (By the way, it does this by the storm hardly moving, and in just the right spot that it is able to grab Atlantic Ocean moisture on the eastern side of it and that moisture rides up over the top of the storm and back down into NY State added to the moisture that is picked up off Lake Ontario). And, with enough cold air 9which we have), and a persistent northwest wind crossing the lake (which we also have), the lake snows keep piling up. I expect we'll continue seeing varying intensities of lake effect snow through Wednesday and Wednesday Night before finally easing somewhat to reveal some developing sunshine on Thursday.
Despite this blast of winter, I still feel the overall, winter pattern will be a changeable one, meaning blasts of cold and snow "could" be interspersed with periods of milder and even wet or sloppy weather, and our medium range computer models are already hinting at this possibility for later this week.
Much can change over the next few days, but as of this writing, I see a relatively uneventful pattern in here from Thursday afternoon into Saturday (nothing big happening), and in fact a little milder. But, more than one computer models is indicating a lot of energy diving down from Canada, through the Plains States and developing a good sized storm in the Deep South by Thursday and Friday. Then, it tracks into the northeast…somewhere. Exactly where it tracks, along with its intensity and speed, will determine greatly the type of precipitation we get out of it. At this point it's nearly even odds for either a heavy, wet snow or snow that could mix with or change to rain. The difference of 50 miles in the track could be the difference between a foot of wet snow and a storm that is mainly rain. Stay tuned, we'll have to wait and closely monitor future computer model runs.
In the meantime, without question, it's all snow! Drive safely and happy shoveling.
A few other links you might find of interest:
The Priscilla Mahar Animal Welfare Foundation: http://www.pmawf.org
All Weather Facebook site. Search Precision Weather Service and "like"
