What You Need To Know About Snowpocalypse 2018

via Storm Hamster 
Let’s just go for it and be done. Could even entertain a little westward shift of the 6-8-12 contours but let’s just cover that during real time adjustments and tracking.

In case you’ve been living under a rock and nobody would blame you if you were we’ve had some intense arctic air pluge well south looking to meet up with warm tropical moisture.

Tracking and adjusting the past few days to the evolution of our two important pieces and they have aligned just about as perfectly as you can get given all the circumstances dealt at distance.

We started tracking features in the Pacific back on December 28th and began to realize we would indeed have a significant storm system on our hands.

Disregarding final model solutions yet using them to identify features incorporated into a late period storm and finding those features is always the first approach. We began to do that back on December 30th. You can read those blog entries linked above and find other tweet storms if you so desire.

As always we attempt to trace the setup in order to set up a ballpark potential.

It always seemed everything was looking to converge around the Florida and Bahamas region which would give birth to a monster. Again you can go back and read these entries and find the many tweets from each specific day as we tracked each of these important features. There were many ideas offered and over time solutions disregarded as the focus steered more and more towards what we could support. December 30th.

Last night everything was coming into focus and a massive storm system was born.

Our arctic front and initial texas system from a few days ago that had merged finished their trek southward to the Cuba coastline and had begun to revert north. Did so about an hour or so before expectation which continued to lead us to support the increasingly significant coastal track.

 
I took a little pathways stab last night for our track and I still like it for the final. Vapor can lead the way sometimes up to many days in advance if you can spot the pinch points and in some cases direct paths through the atmosphere. These are frequently created by thermal gradients that stay in place even as temperatures fluctuate up and down through them. Energy centers like to follow the tight gradients. You may recall one thing I approached this storm with was seeking those gradients best I could from distance. They’ve held fairly good to be honest.

One such gradient is of course our sea surface temperatures. Gulf stream inclusion and cold Florida land mass suggested to lean towards coastal Florida cyclogenesis over the modeled Bahamas or further east suggestions.

Also we do have our arctic intrusion and Atlantic clashing tightening those gradients up as well. Was just yet another reason to lean left from distance.

So here we are at 8AM 1/3. Our surface system is coming together. We have our tight low circulation rather than an elongated one and that is something that surprisingly evolved. Typically when you form along a front you keep that trof like characteristic. More and more we have shifted towards a traditional circulation. We also have that tight thermally induced coastal front and we will try to track that as much as possible before the upper levels give us a little kick eastward. Also note the amplified look (orange) to the system a good healthy sign the upper levels are digging deep.

Our upper levels dug increasingly favorable the past 48 hours and now we can see they dropped right into where we want them. Yes, for further inland areas we’d want even deeper but then the coasts would end up rain over time. So when I speak of “perfection” I speak in terms of everyone possible getting snow without anyone getting skunked with a warm sector and rain. Although there will be some of that on Cape Cod which is unavoidable given our track.

We put all this together and our guidance has finally shed all it’s biases and confusion and even the most suppressed model that had the most subsidence on it’s north west side has decided to drop those biases and get in the game. We’re now a full go if you put a lot of confidence into these things.

We put all the elements together and we rapidly intensify, at twice or more the threshold to qualify for that designation, into an absolute monster today. We won’t be able to keep up with it. It will evolve so fast you can’t tweet enough of an updated graphic on any particular feature. By the time you press submit it’s old news.

Winds will be howling. This will be an issue all the way up the coast line but obviously in particular for Eastern New England and Nova Scotia. Expect power outages and in some cases they could be scattered to widespread.

We’re lit up like a Christmas Tree. Please find your local statements and look for adjustments and updates throughout the day.