Weekend Snowstorm Model Maps: LA to Maine

It's the first potential snowstorm of the season for the Deep South and Northeast U.S. and the weathermen in this building are getting hyped. Now, that could be a problem because we could get too hyped for the first storm of the season and the mid-Atlantic and New England I-95 "snow geese" as we call them will be disappointed if it doesn't pan out. But you can judge for yourself how confident Joe Bastardi is in the forecast - he's just put out a video about it, for free on AccuWeather.com (click below to play). Henry Margusity has also issued a snow map. Frank Strait is covering the Southern angle in-depth on his blog and I'm sure Elliot Abrams and Joe Lundberg will have something to say about this soon.

Here is a large version of the map that Joe showed in the video, which was the GFS model's overnight run prediction for snow accumulation.* (All these maps are available on our Pro site which has a 30-day free trial.) That model's prediction is certainly a dream storm for the snow geese.

There are good and bad things about the storm's distance in the future... the time frame is this weekend (for the Northeast) which means that it's still 4 days away. It's so early in fact that AccuWeather.com has not yet created an official map for it (though we probably will draw a vague one later this morning).

Four days can be a lifetime for the computer forecast models and the storm that will drop this snow has not even formed yet. The one forming in Texas today will sweep the East Coast with rain tomorrow but will be long gone by this weekend - a new storm will dip south out of the Rockies into the Gulf and up the coast; the snow map above kind of shows the northern edge of its track. All of this means there's plenty of time for something to get a little out of whack meteorologically and make this storm a big bust. But 4 days is also good news because it means that today we'll have several models predicting the storm instead of only 1 or 2 (while there are dozens of computer models, only a couple go out further than 4 days).

Here's a look at another model, the DGEX:

Note that it is a little further west with the New England snow, which could leave the big cities wet or with only a little snow. It's a little too early today to have the benefit of the NMM, the preferred short-term model, though it's ending snowfall map across Louisiana looks similar to those above, which is a good sign - this means it thinks that the storm is starting out in the same way. I'll feel more comfortable predicting a weekend snow storm when this model is confirmed to show it along with the others; this will come tomorrow night and Thursday.

*A couple notes: This assumes a 10:1 snow ratio, which is typical for most of the United States but can vary greatly. The GFS shows snow on the ground, not total accumulation so amounts on either side of this time frame (east Texas and Maine in this case) may be lower than previous frames in the animation that I took this image from.