From my Weather guru, Joe Bastardi of Accuweather, at 2:30 today!
"THURSDAY 2:30 PM
Beach battering through the weekend Delmarva to southern New England.. Branch breaking snows in places outlined in previous posts.
I won't dwell on the snow.. once above 1,500 feet, anywhere from West Virginia to central New England, you best be ready to deal with power outages. I would be concerned above 1,000 feet, above 2,000 feet. But roads that are above 2,000 feet in pa may be impassable Saturday afternoon. That could occur before, but it is the second storm that has the chance to put down a foot to 18 inches in 12 hours..the first storm is a 1 inch at valley floors to 6 inches in the highest mountains. Wild bands develop when the upper low comes in.
But now that the idea of the two storm deal is clear, it is time to pull out the stops on what could be a major tidal flooding event from the Delmarva to Cape Cod. The rogue storm develops a warm core and because it does this, it is a smaller scale intense system within a larger area of low pressure. It has its own isobaric field that it takes with it... and leaves behind a northeast flow into the beaches, rather than turning the wind to northwest. The gales lasting the coastal areas tonight do diminish tomorrow, but a stiff northeast wind continues tomorrow and tomorrow night and by Saturday morning, a new storm is developing about 150 east of the Virginia capes. The gets entrained back west of north toward the approaching upper low.. So what we have here is the first system leaving the playing field, but leaving behind a field ripe for the dynamics to take over. Heavy snows resume in the mountains of Pennsylvania late tomorrow night with a band into West Virginia and then stick east-northeast toward New England. However, it is the coastal areas that now have to deal with a renewed gale from the northeast Saturday into Sunday. The center should "tuck in" to near the mouth of Delaware bay for a time late Saturday and Saturday night, then leave Sunday into Monday.
This means the threat of major flooding for the shore towns from Ocean City, Md, north during the weekend as the second storm winds up. Obviously, the number one target would be farther north -- the Jersey Shore and then up to New England.
Total precip of 3-5 inches with both storms will occur in east central Pennsylvania and a lot of that will be snow in the high ground, though amounts on the ground should not get to the 10-to-1 ratio. However, a devastating foliage event, given credence to the idea that the year that some thought was without summer in some of the areas of the Northeast in these mountains winds up as a year without a fall foliage, event is in the making."
The Colonel
