Heavy Snow by Tomorrow Night

We have got ourselves busy the next several days with two storms that are going to affect New England. The first one is the one for tomorrow night and early Monday morning that will dump good snowfall for all of New England, a widespread 4-7" of snowfall, with a sweet spot along the Mass Pike from Springfield, to Worcester, to Boston and up towards the North Shore, encompassing Lowell and Portsmouth, NH. Here is where I think there will be local amounts of close to 8-9" of snowfall. This is not going to be real power from say Route 2 southward. It will be much more of the wetter type of spring snows wit the snow falling when temperatures are in the 30-33 degree range. That is what will prevent anyone from seeing over 10 inches of snowfall, coupled with the fact that this baby will be moving. Even the Cape will do fairly well with this storm system. I can see some mixing with rain down there, but I think it will be mainly a wet snow that falls there with 3-6" for southern RI and the Cape and Islands. I would say that Nantucket will see 1-3", but they are always a wild card and come closer to 6" or see a coating and switch to rain. Further north to the South Shore, including Hartford, Providence, to Quincy, a good 4-7" of snowfall will fall during the storm. Again, it will be a wet snow for the area here. Then you get into the pink sweet spot with close to 6"+ for many towns in here. It is still to be determined where this band of heavy snow growth sets up, but looking at the trends on the GFS and other computer models, it looks like this will be the area with the maximum snowfall. As I said 7-9" is possible in this spot. As you get farther removed from the storm, snowfall amounts will decrease, but snowfall amounts of up to 4-7" are still going to be common for much of CNE and NNE will still see a couple to several inches out of this storm as well.

Here is my city by city snowfall forecast....

Boston, MA 7"

Worcester, MA 7"

Springfield, MA 6"

Quincy, MA 5"

Providence, RI 5"

Hyannis, MA 4"

Plymouth, MA 5"

Hartford, CT 6"

Nashua, NH 6"

Gloucester, MA 8"

Keene, NH 7"

NEXT STORM DISCUSSION: We have to talk about the next storm now. I know that you probably don't want to here it, but once our first storm ends sometime around 11AM - 2PM on Monday, our next storm will be right on its heels and could be even larger than its predecessor. We will have about a 12-18 hour lull in the precipitation before the second storm's snow starts to move in from the S&W. At first, it looks like a measely clipper that would be moving right through our area dumping maybe 2-4" of snowfall in a short amount of time. However, on the past runs, the storm looks a tad more potent and now is starting to get a reflection of a secondary storm forming off the Mid Atlantic coast, which would mean oodles of more snow for all of New England. This has been showing on the models for the past two runs, more so on the 18z runs of the models and it looks like this thing has the potential to drop another 6"+ over our area on New Year's Day. Timing of this storm is still somewhat unknown, but I would say that if you are out until 5-7AM in the morning New Year's, Tuesday, you run yourself the risk of getting snowed in wherever you find yourself. This storm could have snowfall rates higher than its predecessor's 1-2"/hr, for it will be a dry fluffy snow falling into air that is in the 20's. We could potentially see snowfall rates in the extreme category of 2-4"/hr. I know its still some 66-84 hours away, but it is becoming more and more ominous with each run of the models. We will take it one storm at a time, but the potential is there for a biggie.

Interesting fact is that much of SNE has about 5-10" of snow already on the ground, so theoretically, many towns could have over 15-30" of snow ON THE GROUND by Wednesday! Wouldn't that be amazing. That is what will keep us very cold with the Arctic airmass coming down behind the clipper. We could be talking a subzero morning here Thursday with windy blowing snow and highs only in the upper 10's. We will moderate to around 40 by the end of next weekend, but the damage will have already been done.

Stay tuned to more forecasts and NOAA. I almost forgot to mention that all of SNE, except the South Shore and Cape are under Winter Storm Watches. I will post updates tomorrow of any warnings or adviories that go up for this first storm of this one-two punch!