Rob Lightbown

My forecast for Western and Central Mass.

Even last weekend's sunshine with 70 degree temperature was wild & interesting, especially seeing my dogwood tree & hydrangeas start to bud!!

YES!!! I've been forecasting local weather for way, way too many years to count & I still find everyday weather interesting (even 33 with rain...lol). So, while we are "ONLY" going to see a 3 to 6 inch snowfall from this upcoming storm, the interesting part to me is that most, if not all of it will fall in about a 6 hour time window. So, 1/2" to 1" per hour snow rates likely. I very rarely find Northeast US weather boring.

I have two Twitter handles - @crownweather for national & tropical weather @route20weather for local weather in Western & Central Mass., including Worcester and Springfield.

As @earthlight mentioned, the squalls late Wednesday afternoon could end up being quite robust. In fact, given the strong Omega & crazy lapse rates, I think this could be the bigger story over the snow on Tuesday night. Definitely looks like a low top thunderstorm profile to me.

Ditto!! I was following him up until then & immediately stopped when I saw the crap he was tweeting the night Michael was rapidly intensifying and heading for the FL Panhandle. Those types of tweets are seriously dangerous as they could've made anyone debating whether to leave or not decide to stay.

Look up what he tweeted in the hours before almost Category 5 Hurricane Michael made landfall on the Florida Panhandle. In summary, he dismissed the recon reports and was declaring it a barely Category 1 hurricane (I wish I were kidding). His "analysis" was based on RTMA data in the Gulf of Mexico & not on recon reports w/ dropsondes inside the actual eye of the hurricane. So, as you can deduce, my opinion of him is very low.

And here is the link for the "red box" analogs. Still shows potential for snows up into southern New England. http://www.eas.slu.edu/CIPS/ANALOG/DFHR.php?reg=EC&fhr=F120&rundt=2018120500&map=thbCOOP72 .

Also, @33andrain, here is a link to the 500 mb heights for those 15 analogs. http://www.eas.slu.edu/CIPS/ANALOG/DFHR.php?reg=SE&fhr=F120&rundt=2018120500&map=thb500HGHT .

You can look at each individual analog date for the time period in question. Also lists the top 15 analogs based on the sfc/upper air prog. Link - http://www.eas.slu.edu/CIPS/ANALOG/DFHR.php?reg=SE&fhr=F120&rundt=2018120500 .

CIPS Analogs continue to insist that accumulating snow with early next week's storm will make it to at least southern New England. Also, as many have already noted, the Euro EPS continues to trend northward w/ many members N of op & ens mean. My educated "guess" right now for here in southern New England is that areas along and certainly south of the Mass Pike have the best chance of seeing plowable snow amounts Monday into Tuesday of next week. Could be anywhere from a few inches to several inches of snow accumulation.

When analyzing things this morning, I noticed that CIPS analog guidance suggests we should see a north shift in the overall track in the coming days. I could be wrong, but GFS looks WAY too suppressed. My gut feeling is that this ends up being a upper Mid-Atlantic/southern New England snowstorm rather than a I-20 "special".

Wanted to add 1 thing in response to the negativity. The snowstorm on November 15th wasn't even really "seen" by the forecast guidance until that Sunday and especially Monday. In fact, guidance didn't pick up on how big of a storm it would be until the day before. In looking at the model guidance and overall pattern each and every day, one thing I have noticed is that the guidance is just that - GUIDANCE, not gospel - and this guidance has struggled mightily already this season. One thing to remember is that the guidance seems to always be too warm & too far north/west at first and then gradually "cool off" and trend S & E as we get closer to the event. My take on this winter for the NE US. I think we probably will see a colder and snowier than average December, followed by a "break" of sorts for January. February into March could be particularly cold and particularly very snowy/stormy.

Regarding Tuesday's sneaky system: Hmmm....3 km NAM slightly further SE with the snow-rain line as compared to the 12 km NAM. This makes all the difference for me here in Springfield as 12km NAM would be a 1-3" system while 3 km would bring 3-6" PLUS. Lower Pioneer Valley of Western Mass tends to get shafted by snowstorms, so I try to temper my expectations. By the way, I am forecasting the weather on a daily basis for Western and Central Massachusetts. My site for this is Route 20 Weather (https://www.route20weather.com/). Sorry, I don't post much here. I need to make this site a place I visit much more often.

A client of mine e-mailed me a little bit ago about that buoy report. I took a look and it is SEVERAL hours old - buoy stopped reporting when it registered a 77 mph wind gust and it hadn't gotten into the eye wall yet. But hey, let's ignore real-time scientific data from inside the eye and eye wall. Yeah, I'm pretty annoyed myself.