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Some more news on our weekend weather... (1-24-12)

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Reported by: Jim Teske

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Published: 1/24 5:54 pm

Updated: 1/24 5:58 pm

You may have heard about the large solar flare striking the earth’s atmosphere earlier today. That has ‘energized’ the atmosphere and is already causing a display of Northern Light’s over the higher latitudes. What are our odds of seeing this display here in central New York tonight? Pretty slim. Here is the latest IR satellite image:

The cloud cover is quite extensive and with winds shifting into the northwest tonight lake effect clouds will be around all night long. Check out this web site to see some pictures of the Northern Lights where they do occur tonight. If there is any good news it’s that we are in the part of a sun cycle where the sun is more active and we should see more solar flares over the next year or so. Lets just hope the next one coincides with a nice big area of high setting up over the Northeast.

In other news, there is no real change in the forecast for the next few days but there is one potential ‘fly in the ointment’ come this weekend. The conventional wisdom so far is that a weak storm system moves just to our south Thursday night and Friday with some rain or wet snow then gradually colder air seeps into central New York over the weekend.

The above map is from the GFS forecast from earlier Tuesday and is a forecast for Friday morning. This next map shows how the GFS thinks things will progress by Saturday evening:

On the surface it sure looks like a miss from the low tracking northeast from the Gulf Coast. However, it is never just black and white in the world of weather forecasting. There are also some shades of grey. This afternoon I noticed some of these grey shades when looking at the GFS ensembles. While a majority of the ensembles are like the operational model above (taking this low out to sea) there are a few that keep the low closer to the coast. The chart below shows all the ensemble members for later Saturday and I have put an ‘X’ next to the ones that move the low closer to the coast:

I know the chart above is a bit hard to see but when we use this this ensemble product we are trying to pick up on trends. The trend we see from a minority of ensembles is for a steady, perhaps moderate snowfall on Saturday. The key here is it is still a minority opinion. The maps above are just a few of the models we use and some of the other key ones (European and Canadian) are similar to the operational GFS. What does this all mean? We are sticking with just snow showers Saturday as the most likely scenario with the steadier snow scenario having a low chance of occurring at this point. We’ll keep you posted.

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		S 12 mph	79°

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