ANOTHER Whopper East Coast Storm? Well......Maybe. But Don't Hold Your Breath.

The thick layer of snow on my clothesline and the smushed-by-ice
lilac bush behind it prove I don't need any more
snow in my yard, St. Albans, Vermont. Possibility
of more snow Sunday, but no promises.  

You might have heard rumors that the East Coast would get pounded by another winter storm this coming Sunday.

I'll respond to that the same way I did five days before each of the last few storms. And the same way I did five days before the last non-events.  Maybe, but......

Get used to it. It's really impossible to tell with any degree of accuracy the way a winter storm might turn out anywhere in the country, but especially along the volatile East Coast.

I say volatile because each East Coast storm needs an alchemy of interaction between upper level wind flows up north toward Canada and down south near the Gulf Coast.

Along with that, there are so many ways upper level weather disturbances can interact, and so many variations on how strong potential storms might become.

Which means five days ahead of an event, you can never be sure whether a storm will be strong or weak. You never know if it will track inland, bringing rain, or just off the coast, bringing lots of snow, or way the hell off the coast, bringing the United States pretty much nothing in the way of winter weather.

There's enough alarm bells ringing right now in the computer generating forecasting models to at least keep a close eye on this weekend's weather. But don't be on a big snowstorm just yet.

Right now I'm leaning toward the idea that there will be some weather in the Northeast this weekend, but it won't be a blockbuster like last week's storm was.

The European computer models seem to be most bullish on a pretty big storm as of this morning.  But even there, the European model is hemming and hawing about this storm.

A lot of the American forecasting models are so far saying "Meh" on the idea of a big storm.

But as more information comes in, the computer models will come around into agreement. Either the European or American models will change their minds, but it's a little soon to figure out which one will win the bet.

By the way, get used to this. For the rest of the winter, if you hear somebody say there's a big storm coming in about five to seven days, take it with a grain of salt. Just keep an ear out for later forecasts to see if the rumor mongers were right. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not.

In the short term, winter weary New York and Vermont is in for another winter mess, although this time it's going to be really a small mess.

A weak storm is coming through tonight and tomorrow, which will bring a little mixed precipitation.

That would make some of the roads icy for Wednesday morning's commute. Also in some areas in the region, there's still a lot of snow and ice weighing down the trees. A little more ice could stress things more, bringing down more trees and power lines.

Which would be tough, because some people are only now getting their power back from last week's storm, and they had no electricity for almost a week.

Luckily, a little wind and thawing this afternoon, ahead of tonight's light icing, might shake a lot of the snow off the trees in many areas today, which would help reduce the threat of more power failures later tonight.

A brief mini-thaw will set in tomorrow, but it certainly won't melt much of the deep snow in areas that got socked by last week's storm.

Plus, as colder air filters back in later Wednesday, some of the ski areas could pick up a couple or a few inches of fresh powder.

Even if the rumored storm on Sunday turns out to be a mirage, it's still looking like winter enthusiasts in northern New England and New York will have a white Christmas, with plenty of snow to play in.

In fact, there are hints that some more snow could fall on parts of the Northeast Christmas Eve, but don't count on that yet, either. If we don't know what's going to happen this coming Sunday, we sure as hell don't have a good clue about the middle of next week.

Let's just say the weather pattern looks potentially active, and stay tuned.