Wednesday Morning's Weather Discussion

I have a strong feeling that the National Weather Service and the local news outlets are terribly miss reading this storm.  They believe that the precipitation will change to sleet or rain, and it will.  However, I strongly believe that this will not happen until very close to the end of the storm for most people in Northern New Jersey, except for far eastern sections, and it likely will not change over until almost all of the precipitation has fallen in Sussex and Northern Passaic Counties.  This is the explanation behind my snowfall accumulation forecast.  The snow will develop around 2pm and become very heavy at times, and continue into the night, then possibly mix with or changing to sleet or rain from east to west in all areas at night.  Total possible snowfall accumulations prior to the changeover of 12-18 inches in Sussex and Northern Passaic Counties, 6-12 inches for Warren, Morris, Southern Passaic, Western Bergen, and Western Essex Counties, 3-6 inches in central Bergen County, and central Essex County, and 1-3 inches in Hudson County and far Eastern Bergen County.  Tomorrow morning the precipitation will change to light rain everywhere around 1am and may change back to light snow or flurries before ending around 10am, with a dusting of additional accumulation possible.  Then we need to turn our eyes to the next possible storm for Saturday.  It now appears that this storm will merely side-swipe us, with the worst of the storm remaining out to sea, so we should only see light snow, with possible accumulations of 1-3 inches on Saturday.  Then we have to watch for the possibility of some snow showers for New Year’s Day as a weak storm system heads our way, and this storm could bring some light accumulations, especially at night.  It will then get extremely cold with lows possible getting BELOW ZERO on Thursday morning.  The only good news is that this extremely cold air may keep any large storms from affecting our area, but we will have to wait and see.  I am going a bit out on a limb with my snowfall accumulation forecasts for this storm today.  It is possible that the snow could mix with sleet or rain earlier and this would cut back on the snowfall accumulation quite a bit, but this is my best guess now.  We shall see how it goes soon enough.