DON'T GIVE UP SNOW HOPES QUITE YET!
Two reasons for the headline. The first:
General light snowfall expected tonight through the first half of Monday, with most areas receiving 1-3", localized higher amounts possible on the order of 2-4". Then, a shortwave of energy will pass through our area, ahead of our next cold front. This will arrive in the Rochester area from about 5-7pm Monday afternoon, bringing periods of heavy snow and gusty winds. An additional 1-2" of snow could fall over a very short time, making for poor driving visibility and slick roads.
Number two:
The tone of the blog comments has been quite negative towards Mother Nature lately. It's true, storms seems to purposely avoid us so far this year. And looking well down the road to next weekend... yet another miss as shown by the GFS image above for Saturday morning/afternoon.
HOWEVER, there is hope in this setup. While synoptic snow from this storm would be less than impressive, its the LAKE snow that we are focusing on. This is an IDEAL setup for major lake effect snow in Rochester. A northeast wind gives us the longest fetch possible (time for air to gain moisture from the lakes). If sufficient moisture exists, such as it is depicted, we could easily see some good snow out of this.
As you know, this is a long way out. But it certainly has my attention. You'll hear about it over the next few days.
I just wish we would get an old fashion snowstorm and not lake effect all the time. Why don't these storms track more West like the one last week? I thought an El Nino year causes storms to move more West than East, yet we keep missing these East Coast storms.
ReplyDeleteI am hearing rumors about a huge blizzard for the January 7-9 timeframe. Accuweather is saying this could rival the 93 Super Storm.
ReplyDeleteActually, is lake effect all that bad? Didn't the blizzard of '66 or '77 blow all the snow off Erie onto Buffalo? That's lake effect right?
ReplyDeleteYou do realize that the greatest 24 hour snowfall we ever received was because of lake effect right? You couldn't have a better setup than next weekend (if verified.)
ReplyDeleteAs for attempting to predict a storm for Jan 7-9... that's ridiculous. There's NO WAY you can have any semblance of accuracy that far out. Potential? Sure. I could say that for every day for the remainder of the winter... but I wouldn't be getting my hopes up or changing plans yet!
The 6z GFS had this weeks storm further West and giving us a snowstorm. Now, the 12z GFS has the storm further East missing us totally. I noticed the the GFS flip flops with every run. Is this normal for this model?
ReplyDeleteThis is common not only with the GFS but with a lot of models. This is especially true with a storm this far out. As I was preparing to travel the weekend of the big blizzard along the east coast 2 weeks ago the GFS was sending that storm out to sea and as it got closer to the day it was either east then west until it finally found it about 2 days before.
ReplyDeleteThis is what we try to tell everyone when looking at these models. You can't get to exciting by one run of the model or even 2 or 3 several days out. The models change a lot. I think Scott mentioned this in a previous post in the comment section. There always seem to be this big storm 10 to 15 days out and then it either fizzles or is moved and not nearly as strong as it was forecasted 10 days previous.
I know a lot of you want a big snow storm but as Bob mentioned above. Most snow comes from Lake Effect. Especially the greatest 24 hour snowfall was Lake Effect NOT due to a snow storm.