Major Winter Storm for Late this week

Well...

As you know, I forecasted a winter storm last week in my last update and I see no reason to make any changes. It appears that a winter storm is headed for the Mid Atlantic for late this week. Ill go into that in a second.

First of all, i was surprised by how warm it got on Saturday after the arctic front came through on Thursday night. But we are in a winter pattern and as you heard last night, the winds and the cold came back in strong fashion as a new arctic air mass rolled into town. So we were basically between air masses over the weekend. The fresh batch of arctic air will be an important player for a storm coming out of the Gulf of Mexico later in the week.

Storm Discussion:

It appears that low pressure will develop in the gulf of mexico and track NE to the VA coast and then up the eastern seaboard. This storm does have issues as there isnt High Pressure to the North which is what is needed to keep the storm all snow. Most of our big dumps have high pressure in Eastern Canada funneling cold air down. This one wont. The fresh arctic air that arrived last night will be stale by the end of the week. It appears that the more west you are of DC and the other I95 big cities, the more snow will fall as DC and East will likely have a changeover to ice aand rain while Dulles Airport,Fredrick,Hagerstown would be mostly snow and then change to sleet before ending. It will be a very close call with regards to temps and will have to update this basically everyday. Even up North as you head towards boston, the storm will start as snow and probably changeover. But expect a nice dump of snow from DC to Boston before a changeover. The track could still change so this will need updating. This looks like it would be a Thursday night/Friday event. All in all, this should be our biggest event of the season but certainly not a blockbuster.

After the storm passes, We will have a painfully cold stretch as Ive been hyping for a while and there will be additional storm threats with colder air involved but well save that for another discussion.