Could we see snow for Christmas?
For snow lovers, there is still hope for a White Christmas. Okay, you probably won’t wake up to snow Christmas morning, but some of our computer forecast guidance is suggesting the potential of a few inches of snow to fall Sunday (Christmas) Night into early Monday.As is often the case 4-6 days out, the devil is in the details. We basically have 2 camps this Tuesday evening. The rather benign looking GFS, which really indicates very little if any weather happening around here Christmas. On the other hand is the European model, which is much more developed with an area of low pressure moving northeastward along the East Coast. If this solution verifies, we’d have to do some shoveling around here Monday morning. Here are the 2 main solutions by the time we get to Monday morning:
A bit of a difference, eh? That’s why we’re not going whole hog on the snow idea just yet. I tell you though, a couple things that would favor the European solution at this point. With the Halloween snowstorm and a storm earlier this month, the GFS was benign looking, while the Euro stuck to its guns indicating a storm for those two instances. As we got closer to the event, all of the forecast guidance trended toward the stormier European solution.Secondly, the European tends to handle phasing of separate branches of the jet stream better than the GFS. That’s the animal we’re dealing with in this instance and typically phasing of jet streams is not forecast very well by computer models.At this early juncture, I’d certainly give a nod to the European solution. We’ll see what happens the next couple of days. It may not be until Thursday or Friday before the solution is clearer.This will certainly be fodder for discussion on our Facebook page. ‘Like’ Syracuse Weather Updates to get in on the conversation.
Copyright 2011 Newport Television LLC All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
