Radar animation early on Wednesday morning.

Well it's raining again. It's been raining for 24 hours now at many locations across New England. Here in central New Hampshire we've picked up 0.60" of rain in the valleys and about half that over at Mount Washington. The Mount Washington Observatory is reporting a freezing level of ~5000 feet with freezing rain on their summit. Temperatures are otherwise mid-40s on Wednesday morning across the region. Some resorts will be closed due to weather and conditions on Wednesday, but others will be open. Conditions will be quite soft and likely pretty mush given the rain and warmth. It won't be fun when all this freezes back over.

NAM model forecast animation for 7AM to 7PM Wednesday.

The bulk of the heaviest rainfall will move out likely before you read this Daily Snow leaving behind scattered rain showers for most of the day through evening. Temperatures are going to hover around 40F at most locations throughout the day and not start decreasing until overnight. Temperatures drop back below freezing at Jay around 1AM and at Killington around 4AM and continue dropping through the 20s on Thursday. Conditions will get icy first in the shadows and then firm up/freeze up by late afternoon -- where there is snow.

ECMWF model forecast animation for Sunday (Dec 11) showing our next possible shot at snow.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday all look dry with temperatures in the upper 20s on the slopes across the region thanks to a big region of high pressure over southern Canada (if you recall our Daily Snow from Monday, the ECMWF model forecast was the big winner). A weak storm will approach the region on Sunday, but both the GFS and ECMWF (shown above) models currently have the storm both weakening and tracking south of the mountains. Best shot at light snow will be over in New York, and even then we currently only have 1" in the forecast at Gore. It's our next best shot at some light snow, and it's not much.

We've been talking about the potential for another storm next week (it's always next week, right?). Our Greenland block has been producing an atmospheric traffic jam for us and producing a pretty strong negative North Atlantic Oscillation (high pressure over Greenland and low pressure near the Azores). These scenario can be good for New England snowstorms when they combine with ridging over the Alaska to drive cold air into the U.S. So when's our snowstorm?

About that. Our forecast models are continuing to trend in the wrong direction driving cold air into the western U.S. instead of over the central and eastern U.S. As a result, the storm track for next week is setting up to push a storm from the Central Plains into the western Great Lakes.

Ensemble odds of 1" of new snow in 24 hours for next Friday (Dec 16) 

This set up is usually pretty warm for New England, but high pressure over southeast Canada could deliver just enough low-level cold air to keep things interesting. Not really interesting with buckets of snow, but more of the ice-coast wintry mix kind of interesting. The details are all over the place in terms of timing, but average out to next Thursday/Friday with ensemble odds of >1" snow increasing to ~40%.

Overall, the NOAA Climate Prediction Center is pushing for warm and wet for the week ending December 20th over New England, which is consistent with a storm track up through the Great Lakes. It's not necessarily a snowy pattern. Sorry folks. The models have continued to struggle in week-2, so hopefully we'll get a flop in the right direction for once. Stay tuned.

Look for an update on Friday.

-Dr. Jay