Quiet Weekend Weather...For Once!
For the first time in about a month..we have a quiet weather weekend to enjoy. Granted, the weather is not ideal, but at least the wind is calm and the weather is mainly dry. Our weather is still mainly being controlled by an upper low which continues to sit in the Canadian maritimes. Any morning sunshine has retreated to building cumulus. Skies are quickly clouding over as air rises from the ground into the cooler air aloft being supplied by the upper low. Skies will be mainly cloudy the rest of this Saturday with breaks of sun. High will be in the Lwr-mid 40's.
The upper low continues to spin in spokes of energy or lift which continue to trigger the periodic rain or snow shower. The best chance of any mixed rain or snow showers will be confined across NNE today. Tonight there is a better chance of snow showers across the north with even some minor accumulations in the Northern Mountains. I expect SNE to remain mainly dry tonight with lows falling down to near freezing.
The weather will not be much different Sunday into Monday with abundant cloud cover rotating around the upper low with the periodic scattered rain or snow shower....but over all not very wet or snowy. In fact this low will be back westward from Nova Scotia back into Maine by Monday before finally pulling away. The good thing is winds will be light so temps will feel like themselves which is a seasonal airmass in the Lwr 40's. Clouds will try to break a little more by Tuesday and become partly sunny with a weak upper level ridge into New England as temps will climb back into the mid 40's.
As I am sure you well know we are tracking our next storm for the midweek. The energy is currently in the North Pacific and will be pushing into British Columbia this afternoon. Model resolution and information is not good over the ocean, but we should start to get better info on the overall track this storm will take once it is over land. That said, this storm designated for the Wed-Thursday time period...does not look like a storm for us at this moment.
There is a lot of blocking in the overall upper level pattern. The upper low which sits over us now will be back west then slowly pulling away to be replaced with a blocking high heading into the start of the week. These systems working in conjunction will help in steering our next storm further south. This storm will dive into the Plain states and then track off the coast of North Carolina. The northern fringe of this storm will bring heavy snow to the Ohio Valley to West Virginia to Virginia and may even affect bigger towns like Richmond and Baltimore.
At this point, this does not look like a storm which will have much of an impact on New England because of this blocking high sitting right over us. Once this storm hits the ocean, it will become a large storm with high winds and rough seas. The northern fringe of this storm may bring these effects into SNE sometime later Wednesday into Thursday. It is hard to completely right off this storm as just yesterday, models were showing this storm having more of an impact across SNE. We will just have to wait for better model data to come in. But at this point, I would expect, stiffening east winds Wednesday with a developing surf thanks to a persistent fetch off the water...as winds wrap around this developing, growing strengthening low well south of the benchmark. There are not many winter storms which are expected to track off the coast of Cape Hatteras which end up hitting New England in this kind of set up. Could this all change? Absolutely. Still plenty is up in the air. We could see a slightly track farther north to bring some snow into SNE. But it just does not look like it today. We'll see about the storm tomorrow when we should have some better data to work with.
