The easy thing to predict is that the snow will likely start between around 12 pm and 2 pm from west to east and that it will snow into the night, possibly heavy at times.
The hard part is to tell what happens after that and exactly how much everyone will get.
To help you see the difficulty in this forecast, the American short-range model that I posted the snowfall map from earlier shows 8.5 inches of snow right in the middle of Sussex County, NJ. Meanwhile, the American medium range model (which they just spent a bazillion dollars on to upgrade) shows a half of an inch.
Meanwhile the European model shows 5 inches in the same location and the British model shows 4 inches there.
The short-range American model even shows the potential for up to a foot in areas of East-Central Pennsylvania and up to 10 inches into Warren, Southern Sussex, and Western Morris Counties.
So, what will it be?
Tough one to answer.
The European, British and American medium range models are global models that are designed to handle wide-scale situations very well and give you a good idea of what is generally going to happen.
The short-range models are designed to show high detail of localized weather and are run only for small areas. In the case of the American model, for just the United States. The Canadians also have short-range model that covers our area, and it also shows higher snowfall amounts cutting through our area, but a bit further south with up to 10 inches in East-Central PA and 9 inches in Hunterdon County.
So, yeah, try to figure all this out...
Now you know how difficult this forecast is.
So, what will I do?
I will go with the mid-range and the European model that suggests basically 5 inches for Northeast PA, Northwest NJ, and Southeast NY, 4 inches for Northeast NJ, 1-3 across Central NJ, New York City, and Long Island.
I will however keep a VERY close eye on this. I really want to see what the American short-range model says on its next run with the latest data digested into the model. The next run comes out by around 9:30. I will certainly post a quick update then.
Moving beyond this storm, the Wednesday storm is looking less likely than it did this morning, but after having seen some further data this evening, I must still say that there is a chance, albeit a small chance, that there could be a significant snowstorm on Wednesday.
Then a more significant storm is definitely looking likely next Saturday night into Monday morning. That one we definitely need to keep a close eye on and is one of those that you can just about write down in your daily planner right now.
Then there will likely be yet another snowstorm threat next Wednesday.
Please check back by 9:30 pm for a quick update after the latest short-range American model comes out.
"Weather on the Edge" by Dr. Edge.
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