1.12.12: Delay in the Making?

Good evening to all you avid weather-watchers. Here's the lowdown on the storms--yes, storms--for Thursday:

Snow will fall early morning hours in Berkshire County (1:00 am start). The snow will be the heavy and wet type and will not stick on the roads as well as it will on grassy surfaces. It will likely change over to some kind of mixed precip as we approach dawn. Right now it's much too early to make a call on when that changeover will take place. If it changes over earlier, we're looking at an inch of slush and school will be on for a full day. If it takes longer to changeover, we could see around 3-4" of snow. Given the perfect timing of the storm, there certainly is a decent chance at a delay--if it stays as snow.

The other unique aspect of this storm is that there may be some freezing rain after the changeover, with some forecasts calling for 1/4" of icing in the Berkshires, which would certainly make travel treacherous and would give us an even better chance at a delay (and also a way, way outside shot at a snow day).

Wouldn't it nice to be here? Valdez, AK--7' of snow

Don't forget that the forecasts for snow in the past six weeks have overshot their mark considerably, with much warmer temperatures than originally predicted by the computer models. Unfortunately all you followers out there, the GSD Staff is in agreement that it will be warmer than the models say and we're likely to see the 1" of slush scenario. As always, we reserve the right to change our minds over the next 24 hours.

Check back with us throughout the day tomorrow to see if enough cold air is in place for deeper snow. We will likely see an advisory at some point tomorrow--the key will be to see when the advisory ends as that will tell us how much frozen precipitation we can expect.

We're also keeping an eye on another clipper-type storm for Thursday night into Friday. Again, this storm will produce 2-4" of snow at most but the timely is again looking very good. We'd say our chances are better for the early Thursday storm than the late Thursday storm, but it definitely appears that the jet stream pattern has changed in our favor. It's only a matter of time...