United States

Stormy Pattern taking Shape into Next Week

February 05, 2013; 4:34 PM

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The overall weather pattern recently has been fairly quiet in the West, while Alberta Clippers have been running wild from the central to the east.

As we get toward the end of the week the pattern will get more interesting as southern jet stream energy tries to interact with the northern branch and then another significant ridge builds next week along the West Coast, which could mean trouble for central (cold) and eastern/Atlantic (stormier) Canada.

For the West Coast, it looks like another prolonged period of drier-than-normal weather starting this weekend and through next week.

Potential late Thursday/Friday/Saturday storm in the East

Some of the global computer models are coming to a little better consensus in regards to the double-barrel storm system impacting the East later this week and are now indicating that the northern and southern jet stream energy will phase along the Northeast U.S. coast, leading to a significant coastal storm that could bring heavy snow and strong winds to parts of New England and then up into the Maritimes later Friday into Saturday.

However, I am still not totally sold on this since the upper-level pattern is still quite progressive (not blocky), which makes it harder to get a storm to rapidly wind up just off the coast and slow its forward speed.

Potential scenario for Thur-Sat storm

Anyway, right now it looks like there will be an initial storm tracking up through the Ohio Valley Thursday evening, which will spread a band of moderate snow from lower Lake Michigan and then into much of southern and eastern Ontario Thursday night. Snow should spread into the Ottawa region on Friday.

Upper level support still looks strong, despite the weak surface low for a solid 8 to as much as 15 cm of snow from the Windsor area through the GTA Thursday night before tapering off Friday morning. Amounts will be slightly less north of Barrie and up toward Ottawa. The snow should continue to diminish as it pushes across southern Quebec as the secondary coastal storm takes over just off the Middle Atlantic coast on Friday.

If the latest ECMWF model is correct then parts of eastern New England will have a blizzard late Friday into the early morning hours of Saturday. I personally think the storm will be a weaker and a little farther to the east with the progressive jet stream pattern, but we will see.

The storm will rapidly intensify Friday night to the east of southern New England as the energy finally comes together and the low moves out over the Gulf Stream. Snow will overspread Nova Scotia and PEI Friday night and continue into the first half of Saturday. Not convinced that the storm has much impact on New Brunswick.

If the slower, stronger ECMWF is right then we also get blizzard conditions for Nova Scotia, PEI and even southern/southeastern New Brunswick starting early Saturday. A close call in terms of snow possibly changing to rain in St. John's, Newfoundland.

By the way, the ECMWF also shows another possible Northeast U.S./Quebec/Maritimes storm for the middle of next week. I will worry about that one later.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com