The storm that made headlines across the country’s center has now moved towards the Great Lakes and weakened significantly. It’s far enough away from central New York that we won’t feel the brunt of its impacts, but it will help fuel our area with enough moisture to allow for rain/snow showers to occur through today before changing to snow as temperatures fall overnight.
We’ll be keeping an eye on a second low pressure system that will be forming of the coast of New York City this afternoon. While again this storm is too far away from central New York to impact us greatly, it will help to import colder air to our area tonight, thus the changeover to steady snow showers. Accumulations don’t look significant.
Low pressure will move off the Northeast coast on Sunday but we’ll be left with a persistent west-northwesterly moist flow here in central New York. This will cause some minor lake effect snow showers to fall throughout the day. With temperatures above freezing it will be tough to get any additional accumulation of snow.
A break is expected for us Monday as we will be between storm systems. By that point, however, we’ll be watching the next system (another area of low pressure) pulling out of the middle of the country. This system will tap into the Gulf of Mexico so it should have plenty of moisture to work with and will track up through the Appalachians Tuesday into Wednesday. This will make the precipitation type forecast tricky as temperatures will be just a bit above freezing.
By the middle of the week, the jet stream over North America will be evolving into a blocked pattern. That means once low pressure makes it into the Northeast it will not be in any hurry to leave. That means you can expect an unsettled pattern over the Northeast and central New York right into the start of March.
