United States

NAO Says a Storm Should be on the Coast. How Strong?

October 23, 2012; 9:44 AM

Commentary

1. I posted maps covering the snowfall with the event Wednesday night into Thursday with the first storm coming out of the West. The snowfall will be on the 1- to 3-inch side of things, and the storms will produce mainly gusty winds and hail.

2. Now for the big storm potential. What I believe will happen is that a storm will occur along the coast. The NAO is predicted to be at its lowest values since June 4 of this year. On that day, New York City had rain, and the temp was 63 while Boston had high of 53 and rain as well. A storm did develop along the coast as an upper-level low moved into the Northeast. Now take the same very low NAO in late October and what we should see is an upper-level low developing over the Ohio Valley with low pressure off the mid-Atlantic coast.

The question becomes, is the storm Sandy or does Sandy get whipped out to sea and another storm forms in response to the blocking? I am not sure right now what the answer is, and I would not throw out the Euro solution, although the model has not been doing well handling storms all summer. I think the Euro is the epic storm solution, but my feeling is that the outcome of the storm will be something a little more tapered down from what the Euro shows but is still a storm that somehow gets drawn into the Northeast.

I think at this point with the divergence of the models, anyone talking about historic storms or epic storms based on one model is foolishness. When we start seeing agreement in the modeling, which by the way will take a few more days, we can start talking about impacts. Right now, my prediction is that a storm will develop along the coast and most likely the major cities from D.C. on north will get rain and gusty winds. How strong the storm will be remains to be seen.

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