Winter Storm Watch -- Sunday/Monday, Feb. 22-23

At the GSD Home Office, we tacked on 5 more inches to our seasonal snow total of 44.2". But the big news is a developing coastal storm that could impact school on Monday.

The last two weather-makers were clippers that came in from the west/northwest. This Sunday/Monday storm, though, will be a good old-fashioned coastal storm. That means it has much more moisture associated with it and could produce a moderate to heavy snowfall, especially for South County.

NWS Albany has put up a Winter Storm Watch that begins Sunday morning and ends Monday afternoon. The long-ish duration of the watch means that snow could pile up.

But there's a lot of uncertainty still about the track of the storm. Should it continue to trend more northerly, we will see the Watch upgraded to a Winter Storm Warning. If the storm flattens out and heads more out to sea, we may see the Watch cancelled or turned into Winter Weather Advisory for lighter snow amounts.

The County's last clean sweep of snow days back on January 26 was a slam dunk and most Superintendents called in the snow day the day before. Such is not the case for this storm. The cut-off line between 5-7" and 1-2" will be fairly distinct, so this will be a storm that we'll have to wait out until Monday morning.

The current position of the GSD Staff on this storm is "less confident" (but that is always subject to change!). South County schools will have a much better chance of snow days than North County schools. The timing looks really good so delays and full snow days are very much in play. But we could see a scenario where districts like North Adams, Mount Greylock and Hoosac Valley have a full day of school, and Southern Berkshire has the day off. There could be that much difference in predicted snow amounts south to north.

As for the models, take a look below:

Euro

North American

Short-range NAM

You can see that there's still some discrepancy between the Euro and the North American. Connecticut and Rhode Island schools are definitely looking at full snow days, but it's still a little iffy for our entire County. The NAM does tend to run a little hot, so its 8-12" prediction is almost assuredly too high.

Much more to come on this developing very interesting situation.