February 12 Snow/Ice

What:

Snow/Ice event Sunday February 12 for Northeast PA.

Primary Impact Areas:

Northeastern Pennsylvania and the Poconos (primarily areas North of I-80).

When:  

Precipitation will overspread the region early Sunday morning and last throughout the day.

This will not be a heavy event, but do not be fooled.  Temperatures will hover around freezing in the affected areas and with snow already on the ground from Thursday’s storm, it will freeze. Temperatures will fall as the storm passes through.   There will probably be school delays for many on Monday.  This storm will then blow up off the New England coast, but it will be too little, too late for snow lovers in Pennsylvania.

A Look Ahead:  

There is a lot of disagreement among computer models but the potential exists for several significant winter storms over the next two weeks.  The first potential event would occur this coming Wednesday evening thru Friday morning.  Layman’s terms version:  There will be a storm crossing the country to the North that holds the cold air.  There will be another storm to the South that holds a ton of moisture.  If (and this is a huge ‘if’) these two storms combine (and it has to happen at just the right time, a massive snowstorm will come up the coast.  It will make last Thursday’s storm look minor in comparison.  If everything does not line up perfectly, there will be light snow (or none at all) for the Northeast, and the Carolinas and Georgia will get rain.  A lot more will be clear after we see how strong Sunday’s storm gets after it hits New England.  The stronger Sunday’s storm is, the greater the chance that it ‘paves the way’ for a storm later this week.

In the long range, some models shown a significant storm around the 23rd-24th.  I would take this with a grain of salt…that’s really far ahead.  Models are unreliable at best that far out.  Last week’s storm, for example, didn’t really show up on multiple models until inside five days from the event.

With both of these storms, basically what you want to look for (if you’re hoping for snow) is for a storm to consistently show up on multiple models (GFS and Euro would be a good start) over multiple model runs.  This has not happened yet.  More to come soon!