You may have done a double take when you checked our home page this morning and saw the Winter Storm Watch banner at the top of the page. First thing is first: that watch is for Delaware County and points south into Pennsylvania. Here’s what’s happening.
Up aloft we already have a trough of low pressure over the eastern United States. Meanwhile, dropping southeast through the Ohio Valley is a strong disturbance at the jet stream level. This will help to ‘sharpen’ that trough in the East and eventually try to close off a low in the upper atmosphere over the Mid Atlantic states.
Preceding this storm system is some pretty chilly air. It was 30 degrees this morning in Syracuse which is just a degree off the record low for the day. Combine this unseasonably cool air with the system above and that spells heavy wet snow for someone. Right now it appears the core of this system in the upper atmosphere will be to our south over Pennsylvania. That’s why we think the heaviest part of the storm will be over northern Pennsylvania and perhaps as far north as extreme southern New York. The concern there is that heavy wet snow with leaves still on the trees could pose some problems. We’ll be on the fringe of this system so we could still get some lighter rain and snow showers from Thursday night into Saturday. The best chance will be areas south of Syracuse.
Now these types of cut off systems tend to give us headaches here in the weather office. At times our computer models have problems handling them so we are not letting our guard down. A general rule of thumb is the slower a storm system moves the more a forecaster’s hair turns grey. So even though some of our computers models actually keep us dry for the next couple of days we are going to keep a skeptical eye on things. For the time being and leave some rain and snow showers in the forecast through the start of the weekend. If you live in Ithaca, Cortland or Norwich I would keep a real close eye on things. The Winter Storm Watches are just to your south so just a small shift in this system could have some big implications. Keep checking back to see if there are any changes to the forecast over the next 24 hours.
I will, however, leave you with a positive note. That trough of low pressure will pull out late in the weekend and our temperatures will respond and reach more typical mid October levels early next week.
