Tuesday, December 24th, 2013 - Evening Weather Discussion

Well, I have no idea what the short-range American model was seeing in regards to the heavy snow over southeastern New York State.  There were definitely some snow showers there, but nothing particularly heavy, and certainly nothing measured in inches as far as I can tell.  The short-range Canadian model did a fairly good job with the idea of two separate bands, but missed the placement by a bit and also had the intensity being too high.  I believe that most of us got at least a light dusting of snow based upon what I saw on radar.  I did get a light dusting at my location, although admittedly, I was hoping for a bit more.  It looks like the heaviest snow shower ended up cutting across Sussex, Northern Passaic and Western Bergen Counties where a dusting of snow was likely recorded, with a light dusting in most other locations of Northern New Jersey.  Moving forward, the next thing to watch will be the possibility of a few snow showers on Thursday morning, with the possibility of a dusting in some locations, then a storm may develop this weekend and move north along the coast.  The big question is whether this storm will get close enough to the coast to bring us any precipitation.  If it does, the operational run of the European model was thinking it would be rain this afternoon, but the ensemble mean of the model indicates a higher chance of it being snow.  This is of course if it makes it close enough to us.  There is a chance that it will remain further out to sea and miss us, so we will have to wait and see.  The timing of this storm threat looks to be for Sunday afternoon and night. Then we may see some snow showers on Tuesday as a disturbance passes by.  Then another storm is likely to approach, possibly as early as Wednesday, but the focus seems to be more toward Thursday or Friday.  The American and European models both bring us a significant storm during this time period but the European and American models disagree on how this storm develops.  This tells me that neither model is really sure how all this is going to happen just yet, but it also gives me an idea that they do think something is likely to happen.  This is how many significant storms appear on the models this far out in the future.  With pretty much every truly significant storm I can remember, they appear on the models in the distant future because the model knows something big is likely to happen, but the model will often go about producing the storm from different pieces of energy, as if it just knows that something is going to happen, but it does not know the details yet, so it tries these puzzle pieces, then those puzzle pieces, until it finally finds the right pieces to put the puzzle together.  I flagged this general time period long ago as the models seemed to think that something would happen around the new year.  Now as we get closer in time there seems to be some agreement that something big might happen, but the models are still not sure what pieces will come together to produce the storm.  They will eventually figure it out and you will know just as soon as I do.  Check back for updates.