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Joe Lundberg's Weather Blog

A Few Snow Opportunities

Feb 8, 2012; 11:08 AM ET

Wednesday, 11:40 a.m.

The 2011-2012 winter season has been one of the warmest ever and one with very little snow. For a change, though, there's actually some snow on the ground across the country, and we'll expand that some this afternoon and tonight and perhaps even more so in the coming week. Here's the latest snowcover analysis:

As you can see, there's actually some snow over much of Kansas and Nebraska into Iowa, with some snow over more of central and northern Wisconsin into northeastern North Dakota. We'll add to some of the snowcover, albeit lightly, across northern West Virginia, northern Virginia, and central and northern Maryland into Pennsylvania, New Jersey and even northern Delaware. Some of this, if not all of it, will melt away with two relatively mild days and sunshine tomorrow and Friday.

There probably won't be much snow to fill in some of that gap across the rest of the Midwest through the Dakotas into Montana in the next several days. What cold that does drill across the northern Plains and Midwest will be erased fairly easily later this weekend and early next week. Any snow as the cold air drills southward will likely be back up against the Rockies from parts of central and western Montana into Wyoming and Colorado, where you would expect to see some upslope snow.

A second opportunity for snow will come with the press of arctic air later Friday and Friday night across the Great Lakes and parts of the Ohio Valley into the Northeast. There should at least be a brief period of snow with the front as it crosses the Great Lakes over to the Appalachians, with some relatively minor lake-effect snow behind it.

The more interesting question will be the idea of a more generalized snow across parts of the mid-Atlantic and New England. The European model is most aggressive on this thinking, but even the Canadian model is hanging on to the idea of a developing wave of low pressure that can deepen as it approaches the Northeast coast, able to squeeze as much moisture as possible out of the atmosphere.

Regardless of the outcome, any snow will be relatively light, though surely notable in the overall absence of snow most of the winter to date in these areas.

By the time we finish the weekend, the cold will already be on its way out from the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, leaving behind a stale cold air mass, at least in the low levels. The upper levels will warm to a point, though not to the levels we've seen of late. With a strong system diving into the West early in the week, it will tilt the upper-level flow more to the west-southwest over the Plains to the East Coast. Embedded within that flow will be a weak upper-level disturbance that will combine with a broad low-level flow out of the south to produce a large area of clouds. From those clouds we should expect to see some light precipitation. Across the Ohio Valley and points south, much of that will be rain, but as you get closer and closer to the Great Lakes and into the northern Mid-Atlantic and New England, there will still be enough cold air around that some of that precipitation will have to be in the form of snow once again. Now it won't be a big snow storm per se, but another opportunity for snow. That would be three inside of a week, an almost unheard of feat this winter!

Once that feature passes, the bigger storm coming through the Rockies will cross the Plains and head for Michigan:

That's the GFS for Wednesday morning, and most of the modeling that I have examined suggests a similar track. And much like most systems so far this winter season, it is more likely to be known for rain and potential severe weather, rather than for snow, even though there will be some snow on the north and west flank of the storm from the central Rockies to parts of the Midwest.

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

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