Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Guess What? It's Going To Snow In New England Again

From Twitter, this guy in Scituate,
Mass. doesn't need a ladder
to remove snow from his roof.
The snowbanks are so tall he
just stands on them to get the job done.  
New England can never catch a break.

On Monday, a storm departing the Middle Atlantic States brushed past southern New England. In a fe towns in southeastern Massachusetts, a little more snow fell than expected, including 5.5 inches in Plymouth and 5.4 in Marshfield, Mass.

Luckily, Boston itself only got 0.6 inches of new snow yesterday. Any little bit hurts at this point though.

MORE SNOW IN NEW ENGLAND

Yesterday, I mentioned something called a Norlun trough that is expected to extend back from the departing storm westward toward New England later today.

You can click on this sentence to get an excruciating detailed explanation of the Norlun trough. 

That's still expected to happen, so a few more inches of snow could fall on eastern Massachusetts later tonight and Thursday. Maybe one to four inches, which is just another pain in the neck for that region. Even a little more than the forecasted amount could fall if things set up right.

Worse, this Norlun trough is likely to combine with a weather disturbance accompanying another shot of arctic air to spin up a new storm system in the Gulf of Maine.

If this happens, as expected, much of Maine, including the eastern part of the state that is hopelessly buried under many feet of snow already, could get another six to ten inches of snow out of this. It isn't certain yet, but a winter storm watch is up for pretty much all of Maine and the northeastern two thirds of New Hampshire.

Hard hit New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, Canada ought to watch this one, too. That region is also buried in deep snow and the new system Thursday could drop several inches of snow, says Environment Canada.

The snow from this is expected to extend into the northeastern corner of Vermont late tonight and Thursday, where this is a winter weather advisory for the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont for an expected three to six inches of snow.

Elsewhere in northern Vermont, there could easily be two to four inches of new snow out of this.

ELSEWHERE IN THE NATION

The weather isn't expected to be a picnic in the eastern United States outside of New England, either.

A winter weather advisory is up for a big area today, including Tennessee, Kentucky, parts of the Ohio River Valley and the Carolinas.
From @Conventures on Twitter, a massive
pile of snow cleared from the streets
grows at a "snow farm" in Boston. Note for
scale the size of the heavy equipment
on the pile. 

This is precisely the area that was hit by a very nasty snow and ice storm earlier this week, so this is just piling on. Yeah, only one to four inches of new snow is expected across this region today, but that's a fair amount for them.

Worse, Arctic air is pouring down from Canada, so wind chill advisories and warnings are up for a huge area from the northern Plains through the Midwest, and on into most of the eastern United States, all the way into Georgia and Florida

Record low temperatures are likely to fall in much of this area. Florida is on the alert for hard freezes.

This could end up being the strongest, most frigid cold snap in parts of the Ohio Valley, Southeast and Mid-Atlantic states since the mid 1990s, says the National Weather Service. 

(Up in the Northeast, this cold wave will be about on par with the one that came through Sunday and Monday.)

BACK TO NEW ENGLAND

Up in fed-up New England, we won't be done with the misery of snow and cold during this work week. Another storm system is due Sunday.

There's a lot of uncertainty with this one. Precipitation is expected region wide, but snow might mix with or change to sleet, freezing rain or rain, depending on how much warm-ish air is briefly carried north by the storm system. We're also not sure how heavy the precipitation is going to be.

But still, it's ominious. If a lot of snow falls on eastern New England, that's just much more trouble. If it's a cold rain, it will soak into the powdery snow, putting additional weight and stress on roofs,  adding to the long and growing list of structural failures in New England.

The snow is driving people crazy. It has reduced Boston Mayor Marty Walsh to urging people in Boston to stop hurling themselves out of windows and second story windows into snowbanks, apparently because what else can you do when you're that snowed in.

"It's a foolish thing to do and you could kill yourself," Walsh told the Boston Herald. "This isn't Loon Mountain.......the last thing we want to do is respond to an emergency call where somebody jumped out of the window because they thought it was a funny thing to do."

Well, with that much snow in Boston, it might not be New Hampshire's Loon Mountain, but you can forgive Bostonians from being truly loony from all that snow.

Even Jimmy Fallon has been joking about it, highlighting, like everyone else, Jim Cantore's happy reaction to thundersnow, and newscasters in Boston who quote fifth graders who call the called-off school the "best effing week of my life.

Just for fun, here are some videos from the snow zone taken during the big snow blitz last weekend.

From Face the Wind, we have this video of lovely Plymouth, Mass. this past Sunday:




TVN Weather, a storm chasing group and organization that usually plies the Great Plains in the spring and summer capturing dramatic videos of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, felt compelled to go to Cape Cod during the blizzard last weekend, because after all, that was a severe storm, right?

Here's a sample of what they got:



The following video was taken before the February 15 blizzard, but after Monkton, New Brunswick, Canada was socked by mulitple snowstorms in the two weeks leading up to February 4.

It shows what it was like to walk along the streets and sidewalks of Moncton:

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