Winter Storm Watch No Longer...Winter Weather Advisory Posted

Late this afternoon, the Winter Storm Watch became null and void for WNY. A Winter Weather ADVISORY remains posted for the entire region until late Sunday afternoon. It's a very complex scenario over the next couple of days. First, light snow will overspread WNY overnight...temps overnight will rise through the teens and 20s. We will get some accumulation...by no means a major snowfall event...a few inches for the metro area northward and perhaps slightly more south, certainly enough to make for slippery travel. During the early morning, snow is expected to mix with or change to a wintry mix of sleet and freezing rain. At 10pm tonight, temps in the southern tier were already in the low 20s, but the farther north you go, the colder it is. With the warm front buldging northward, I would expect more icing in the southern tier for a short while. Yes, the entire region should experience the wintry mix changeover during the first half of the day tomorrow...but with temps warming into the mid to upper 30s later in the day...all liquid is on the way for the evening hours. Precip may taper off for little while tomorrow, but rain's moving in tomorow evening. When the cold front finally pushes through tomorrow night...another interesting setup is on the way....cold, strong winds and general snow showers in time for the Monday morning commute. Winds may gust as high as 50mph for the start of the week. Some earlier model runs had me thinking the metro area would get a brief, quick hit of lake snow, but the latest runs showing good lake snows setting up in ski country and the southern tier on Monday. Stay tuned!!

Winter Storm Watch this Weekend

A Winter Storm Watch goes into effect Saturday evening into late Sunday evening. My own thinking is that conditions won't go downhill until after midnight Saturday night. Snow will reach Chautauqua County first, toward midnight, and gradually spread to the NE in the predawn hours. An early estimate would be 2-4" of snow before the cold air grows more shallow and we go over to sleet, then freezing rain. Some models try to keep us in mainly freezing rain for the balance of Sunday, but I can't buy that right now. With warm advection and a SE boundary layer flow, I see us going over to rain by midday/early PM Sunday in the lower elevations ( valleys to the SE, Orleans & Gen Cos may take longer), with rain in the evening turning back to snow after midnight Monday.

It's always difficult to make a call on the depth of the subfreezing layer in a situation like this. This storm system will be a major weathermaker, but as I've posted elsewhere, it's not going to be as powerful as originally progged back on Tuesday. If we were to stay all frozen precip, of course, we'd have major problems.

In advance of all this, winds have come up after all to advisory level (bit stronger than I'd forecast and stronger than yesterday's NWS forecast), so there'll be some 50+ gusts this afternoon on the Niag Frontier & Chau Co, w/rain & snow shwrs arriving ahead of a cold front late in the day, turning quickly to snow early this evening. Not a lot of accum, but some blowing snow and maybe a few slick spots--very gusty winds continue this evening, diminishing later.

Calling All Weather Groupies

We are so lucky to have real-time access to a network of 100+ remote monitoring stations for forecast purposes and sharing the localized weather conditions observed by these systems with our viewers.

Unfortunately, the WeatherNet stations lack eyes and ears. That's where our viewers can be of great assistance.

All of the WeatherWatch 4 meteorologists greatly appreciate spotter reports and pictures (it's now much easier for us to get your photos on the air in a timely manner) especially during significant weather events...but even the pretty pictures are nice.

If you have something to report, send your spotter reports to...
WeatherWatch4@wivb.com

If you have pictures to send...
Newstracker@wivb.com

Information concerning snowfall rates and amounts, precipitation type, lightning and thunder, and road conditions are extremely valuable to us as well as our viewers. Any additional information that we can pass along, could potentially make everyones day just a little bit easier.

La Nina Doesn’t Necessarily Mean a Snow Drought

In light of the present La Nina event and the suggestion that snowfall may be lighter this winter, I decided to dredge up some recent research.

Several years ago, my son Chris, who happens to be a closet meteorologist, though he would never admit to it, with the help of some “weather guy” at Channel 4, did an analysis of Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies projected on a plot of the annual Buffalo snowfall for a school project.

As a matter of background, the cyclic warm temperature anomalies in the Pacific are referred to as an El Nino event, whereas, the cold temperature anomalies, La Nina. Both El Nino and La Nina events have a significant impact on the hemispheric weather patterns and to some degree, even the weather here in Western New York. For the sake of the study we considered only major El Nino and La Nina events and eliminated the minor events.

The monitoring of Pacific sea surface temperature was in its infancy as late as the early 1970’s. I recall corresponding with Jerome Namias of the Scripts Institute, one of the pioneers in the Pacific SST research while in high school during the early-mid 70’s, and even during that time, Pacific SST anomalies were neither classified as El Nino or La Nina events.

For the sake of our study, we reviewed Pacific SST patterns from the early 70’s through 2000. Interestingly, during that period there were four significant La Nina Events. The first resulted in a Buffalo winter snowfall of 89” in 1973-74, then 82” in 1975-76, 67” in 1988-89 and finally 100” in 1998-99. Aside from the winter of 1998-99, which resulted in considerably less snowfall, none of the La Nina events produced a snow drought for Western New York.

Another interesting by-product of this study was that significantly less annual snowfall was recorded at Buffalo pre-1950 as compared to post-1950. Chalk it up to either cycles or climate change; there were only three 100+ snowfall winters from 1920-1950, whereas there were 18 between 1950-2000.

Snow lovers rejoice!

And Then There's Sunday/Monday....

At the time of this posting (Tuesday evening), it appears that an area of low pressure will pull out of the southern plains and bring us a moist SE flow on Sunday. If it follows this early indicated path, precip could begin as a little snow, then turn to sleet & light freezing rain, and probably to all rain later on Sunday. But once this storm passes off to our NE by early Monday, it may deepen explosively and produce a high wind situation with snow showers and blowing snow worsening during Monday. Right now, those lower level winds are slated to be westerly, then northwesterly, which would keep the heaviest lake snow south of the metro area. This far in advance, that's a close call. But if model trends continue as they are, this will be a major storm for the interior of the NE, and would have a significant effect on our viewing area -- with winds likely even stronger than they were today. As always, I'll keep you updated.

Wintry Pattern Change Still Coming

A pattern change we hinted at 2 weeks ago, and spoke more definitively of last week is still coming, but....there are caveats. Late last week it began to appear the coldest of all patterns, in which Siberian air crosses the Polar region and drops through the Canadian prairies into the northern & northeastern states, was setting up. This cross polar flow is usually related to a strong ridge of high pressure stacked up into the atmosphere over the western part of North America, and a ridge of high pressure over Greenland in a Negative/Cold phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation working in tandem to force the polar jetstream to take a deep dive into the U.S.

Over the weekend and into today, however, it now appears the Negative NAO will not be that strongly negative, and only limited cross polar flow will develop into the Yukon. These polar airmasses , dropping so far to the west in Canada, have the chance to become modified on their way to our region. Bottom line: It will get plenty cold, but not to extreme values--some days with highs in the 20s.

There will also be several possible rounds of lake effect snow. On Tuesday, there may be several hours of limited lake snow mainly in ski country, and possibly the Buffalo Stowns, in the afternoon as gusty, cold westerly winds increase with temperatures at around 5000' (850mb) just cold enough to make it happen. A more impressive potential will develop on Thursday afternoon, though that flow will veer to a more NW orientation. On Friday, a wave in the upper level winds will back winds to SW and possibly bring some lake snow north, and on Saturday--a very cold day--there will be some lake snow potential as well, though lower level winds become more uncertain farther out in time.

If that's not enough, there are early indications of either a general snowfall or mixed frozen precipitation from a southern plains low by Sunday evening.

Wintry enough for you folks?