Thursday Morning Snow

Today's lesson in school cancellation forecasting is, once again, never underestimate the power of ice in the forecast.

Superintendents are proving to be very skittish this year as almost all schools north of Pittsfield cancelled school for today even though precipitation had not started falling in the county when they made their calls. The big shocker is that we did not hear from Southern Berkshire for this storm.

We continue to be slightly off on our predictions with these ice storms. The GSD Staff would much rather be wrong in the right direction than wrong in the wrong direction, so hopefully you'll forgive us. We will continue to tweak our algorithm and try to do better with these ice storms.

The good news for those south county schools left out of the fun today--your next chance for a shorter day (or no day at all) is Thursday. We have a developing coastal storm for Wednesday night and Thursday morning. This storm will be much easier to predict.  The cold air is in place for an all-snow event. The storm will either hug the coast or it won't. The European model brings it closer to the coast; the North American model takes it farther out to sea. If it does hug the coast, we could see moderate snow in south county with very good timing. We would see 1-3 inches in the northern half of the county and 3-5 in the southern half.

Our next storm. Image courtesy of Accuweather's Bernie Rayno.

The track of the storm will be impacted by how today's storm does, so we'll be able to tighten up our forecast for Thursday morning tomorrow when we get more info from our valuable sources.

Enjoy the day, if you have it off. The snow started around 8 AM at the GSD Home Office and we're yet to see sleet. Enjoy it while it lasts because it will be all rain by later this afternoon.