Here We Go

You know something is going on when winter storm watches are posted for Philadelphia days before the first flakes will fly.  Or when watches and warnings already extend from Georgia to Pennsylvania.  It usually means a couple things.  There is cold air to work with and a lot of moisture.

The reasoning the certainty of snow is already high is because all the big boy models have already agreed on a track except for the GPS which is notoriously slow to grasp the idea.  The agreement of models can certainly lead us towards the correct direction of a storm however with at least 48 hours of an open window for change I still can't go all in.

If we are going to get the big one this seems to be the candidate.  Even though a decent amount of snow has fallen, nobody in the northeast has seen that huge storm this year.  That could change.  In doing so, and with my belief in patterns, it could be the final KO punch of the season allowing us time to get up and move towards spring.

A lot of talk in the weather community for the northeast over the last week centered around the storms we already received and the one over the weekend that we did not.  This one didn't sneak up on anybody.  It's been on the model runs for just as long as the other storms, but it got buried behind the wave of storms.  It's finally pushed it's way to the front of the line and without us being able to see it from a distance, is becoming the biggest wave of them all.  Yes, I'm fully aware that my last comparison of winter storms was to trains but storms can be waves too.  Okay?

So here is the fun part about watching and waiting for models to come in.  They bounce around all over the place.  The shift, like many this season, was to push the storm further north and west then what was being picked up.  The model this afternoon did just exactly that.  Had I decided to show that one it would have looked impressive.  As I was writing this the run from tonight updated.  I figured it would push it even further north and west.  It instead took it south and east.  This is why I don't do a lot of commenting on storms too far in advance.  It could have been a bad run.  It could have been a sign that maybe this thing does stay closer to the coast and the overreaction has already begun.  I don't know.

I've been accurate enough this season that while I will read and take notice of what others are saying, I also will not put much stock into it.  They have had just as many missteps as anybody else.  It's weather.  What do you expect.  Meet me here again tomorrow night and we can pick up the conversation.