Good Friday, everyone. Your friendly weatherdude will be on the road for a couple of days, so posts will come at random times instead of the normal structure you often get. My twitter feed will be alive and well with constant updates, so give me a follow. 🙂

Everyone is now fully paying attention to Christmas week and the potential for a healthy storm across our region and for much of the eastern part of the country. Before we get to that, we have to watch tonight’s southern system to see if it can throw some light snow our way into Saturday.

The new version of the GFS tonight and Saturday morning…

GFS

That’s some very light stuff, but it does want to target the southern half of the state for some flakes. The European Model suggests a few flakes a bit farther north than that.

Speaking of the European Model… it takes that system and stalls it off the Carolina coast later Sunday and Monday. That then allows rain to develop around here for Monday as we await the arrival of the bigger storm system late Tuesday into Christmas Eve.

The European Model shows our storm bombing out across the Ohio Valley into the Great Lakes…

Euro “Bombing out” just means this storm strengthens rapidly as it pushes across the region. Taken at face value, that run shows rain and wind on Tuesday with a rapid temp drop and a change to snow by Wednesday morning. High winds and snow showers and squalls then carry us through Christmas Eve and Day. Again… I am ONLY breaking down what the model is showing. A scenario like that would put some snow on the ground.

The Hi Res GFS also shows a storm that bombs out from the Ohio Valley into the Great Lakes…

GFS 2

The Canadian Model has a similar scenario…

Canadian

The regular GFS continues to have a progressive look, but it does show, in it’s own way, a similar overall setup…

GFS 4

As you can see, the GFS doesn’t offer up the stronger solutions of the other models. Let’s say that worked out like that… it would STILL produce widespread snow showers and flurries with very gusty winds for Christmas Eve. To be honest… I would totally settle for just that. 🙂

The more I look at this pattern for late month into January and then look at the supercomputer analog years that match the pattern… wow. It’s becoming very apparent my winter forecast for January was not cold enough (and it was very cold to start). I said the same thing around this time last year and we saw how that worked out. Not only are analog years that featured bitter cold showing up… several of them also produced memorable storms.

Busy times ahead. I will have updates at some point later today. Make it a good one and take care.