I hope the first day of 2015 was rewarding for everyone and that you started the new year off on a good note, but mother nature has some wrenches coming our way for the first week of the year.
There are two significant storms possible in the next week.
First is Saturday night and Sunday. The storm will move in between 4-6 PM Saturday with a burst of heavy snow, as temps will be as cold as they are now (in the 20s). Eventually, this will turn to sleet and freezing rain for a time. Based on the new model runs, I think 1-4" should do for most of the region, with some areas getting little snow but a bunch of sleet. The attention then shifts to just south of here, as (this is new today) a secondary low develops, but it's far too weak to do anything significant overall except deflect the wind direction. That is very important in this type of storm. Why? Because an easterly wind is not nearly as warm as a southerly one...and the end result could be a severe inland ice storm if everything plays out badly, as as much as 0.25" of ice is possible in the worst case scenario (which is more than anyone in Connecticut has gotten in a good five years or so). Either way, Sunday it'll simply pour, so any accumulation will melt away, but the cost is losing a day of the weekend, as Sunday is a total washout.
The other trouble spot appears to be Tuesday and early Wednesday. A classic Alberta Clipper will race towards our region, bringing 2-4" of widespread snowfall. These things typically happen with any wintertime clipper, and there can be as many as 4-6 of these each year. There's a few red flags with this one, however....first, a second low may develop and try to absorb the clipper off the coast of New England. Additionally, the water temperature is very, very warm...and that's worth thinking about as well. If this occurs just so....then it could be a situation similar to 2/8-2/9 2013, but I wouldn't be too worried just yet, since everything would have to fall into place just so for it too be anything except a 2-4" snowfall. It's important to watch closely, though, since if models go just a tick different it could be much much higher than that, and I can't really see it going lower (since Clippers are actually rather easy to forecast).
The bottom line is- we can't say much more than this with any certainty. I've told you all I can for now, so I'll see you tomorrow. For those of you wondering, by the way, here are the GFS maps from the same computer model runs today and from 2/4/13 (the same distance)
You can see a bit of my concern here, as if you can paint a picture of the previous few top runs, you can see a rather similar evolution. What I want people to get out of this (for now, I understand it's confusing if you aren't used to them!!) is the relatively similar location of the lines (they're isobars, but you don't need to know that nor what they mean), and the similar storm evolutions (green is precipitation, not necessarily rain)
I hope I didn't get you confused by the above pictures. I promise you it's not my intent. What I want to show is how similar yet somewhat different the pattern is (or was modeled to be) around the same time before the storm of our lives, as compared to what it is now. I'll do this throughout the year, as it may well show you just how tough it is to nail a forecast (and you'd be surprised at how often we get patterns not too dissimilar, it's just that everything came together exactly as it needed to that one time in 125 years, which appears to be the average return period for that kind of storm.) This is also to do the comparison I get asked to make pretty much every time a big storm comes- how does it compare to the Great Blizzard of 2013? With any luck, you can draw conclusions as well as read mine :). Does all of this mean such a storm won't happen again in our lives? Of course not. Nothing is guaranteed in weather. Does it mean it's unlikely? Absolutely. Don't hold your breath for the next one- if you do the math out, it should be in about 2137.
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