Tuesday Forecast

96 Comments

7:29AM

DAYS 1-5 (MARCH 22-26)…
The departing cold air delivery northwest wind carries with it a few flurries that may briefly visit a few locations early today before the wind shifts to the west, sun dominates, and the morning chill fades as the late March sun climbs in the sky – not a bad day at all. Then we turn unsettled and this will happen as a front drops down from the north, slowly enough to allow much of the region to remain on the mild side of it Wednesday albeit with lots of cloudiness. A few areas of light rain may traverse the region as this front drops south of us and allows much cooler air in and a continued overcast Thursday. The front tries to come back with aid of an approaching low pressure Friday, which tracks north of the region. At this time I think the front will have just enough push to move back to the north and allow the mild air to return, but with wet weather. Finally, a cold front from the west pushes it all out of here by the end of Friday, setting up a nice, but cooler Saturday.
TODAY: Partly cloudy with isolated snow showers until mid morning, then mostly sunny. Highs in the 40s. Wind NW shifting to WSW 5-15 MPH.
TONIGHT: Increasing clouds. Lows in the 30s evening, rising back to the 40s overnight. Wind SW 5-15 MPH.
WEDNESDAY: Mostly cloudy. Slight chance of light rain showers in the afternoon. Highs in the 50s. Wind WSW 5-15 MPH shifting to NW late.
THURSDAY: Cloudy. Spotty light rain daytime. Better chance of rain night. Lows in the 30s. Highs in the 40s.
FRIDAY: Mostly cloudy. Best chance of rain morning. Lows in the 40s. Highs in the 50s.
SATURDAY: Sun and clouds. Lows in the 30s. Highs in the 40s.

DAYS 6-10 (MARCH 27-31)…
Fair and milder March 27 (Easter Sunday). Chance of rain March 28. Fair and cooler March 29, milder March 30-31.

DAYS 11-15 (APRIL 1-5)…
A turn to colder than normal with potential unsettled weather which may include not just rain but some mix/snow as well.

96 thoughts on “Tuesday Forecast”

  1. Thank you, TK.

    Horrific news and images from Belgium. My prayers go to everyone in Belgium and the world

    1. Best of luck, Longshot. I’m hearing on the news that it is difficult to reach anyone. One of the folks on the Today show has a lot of family there and has been unable to reach them. I’ll keep them in my prayers.

  4. Good morning and thank you TK.

    Beautiful morning around these parts.

    Not much happening today. Battle of the air masses next several days, but then doesn’t
    that define Spring?

      1. Thank you! Yeah they went out today in the foxboro to north Attleboro areas. Tomorrow off then going out Thursday and Saturday. I would like to finish 1st round visits by April 1st.

    1. I lived in Dracut at the time, and was 7 years old… we got a lot of snow, and some neighbors built a huge snow Easter bunny that was featured in The Lowell Sun .

      1. I help my son and his friend build a snow bunny as well.
        I have a picture somewhere. I’ll have to post it.

    2. Eric mentioned this on air during the newscast yesterday. Good to see that he is not like most TV mets declaring winter over prematurely. Yes JP, Logan did receive 13″ in April 1982 and should be in the 12″+ category.

      One issue I have with Eric (and perhaps most TV mets) is that his snow stats are a bit off sometimes. 😉

  9. It seems like all this prior talk of April being well above average in temperatures seems unlikely. Perhaps more the opposite and maybe a pattern flip during the last week of April?

  10. The GFS continues to highlight April 5th as an area of interest for storminess on the east coast. Each run is a little bit different in how the norther stream and southern stream interact, but its been there for some time now. I don’t have detailed Euro info and hate the 24 hour increments that show up on the model sites.

        1. How about a friendly bet?
          2 parts…
          1) Boston goes below 32 in April on at least 2 calendar days.
          2) Boston gets measurable snow once in April (measurable snow is defined as 0.1 inch or greater).

          2. If that’s for me I’ll take it and also I think both could happen . I don’t think there will be a plowable snow till the end of this year meaning December . Could it flurry, suger coatings of course but I doubt that maybe flurries . I’m going with gut and spring snow happens but it’s rare, Epstein wrote about this last week. I could aldi be wrong . Just an opinion.

            1. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Boston misses out on a plowable snow that may occur somewhere else in southern New England, as plowable snows in Boston are EXCEEDINGLY RARE. However, when we talk about the “feel of winter” or a “winter pattern” in April, we’re not saying it’s going to feel and look like January, save for possibly a few hours such as what happened in April 1982 when it dipped to the teens for much of April 7 after the foot plus of snow April 6, but that pretty much goes without saying. 🙂

    2. Except that the upcoming pattern will be on the negative side of normal with some big chill (for April) quite likely. The event that needed to take place for that is underway now.

  13. Go for Snow – was just looking at the 12z GFS for early April as well . It continues to be bullish on unseasonably cold weather to start the month, including the coastal storm threat around 4/5:

    http://www.tropicaltidbits.com/analysis/models/?model=gfs&region=us&pkg=mslp_pcpn_frzn&runtime=2016032212&fh=336&xpos=0&ypos=0

    The Euro operational only goes out about 10 days, but there are strong signals as well on the extended Euro weeklies for some very cold air around the same time. It is still an active pattern with frequent precipitation threats so there is a good chance we some frozen precip at some point to start April.

    1. Mark, Nice round up and I concur.

      I, too, believe we see some snow in April. How much is the question?
      Something like we just had is more likely than a blockbuster, but even that
      cannot be ruled out entirely.

      A typical April with snow, features more smallish events of small accumulations on front end or back end of storms, but a full blown coastal with snow can and does happen very occasionally.

      1. Strongly -EPO on the Euro for several runs now and NAO trying to go negative around the same time. It would not be out of the question at all for some East coast storm development first week of April.

      2. I’m going 180 now OS. Given the pattern, I think the interior is going to get one good heavy one. Time to eat that crow sandwich for me.

  14. 12Z Euro has a really decent system centered over CT on the 29th. Wouldn’t take
    much to place that on the coast. It’s a week out, so we shall see.

    Imagine that plus one in early April.
    Awesome.

  15. Get that system offshore and track in a good spot with enough cold air in place that could be interesting. Looks to have a good deal of moisture with it.

  16. Early next week got Eric Fisher attention
    Monday looks very interesting…that’s quite a disturbance on the ECMWF. Will it go west or east?

  17. Euro has an interesting situation around 4/1. It has a system passing to our N&W with
    COLD poised to enter NE upon it passage with a TON of MOISTURE hanging
    back on the front near the gulf. Could ignite another system to come up the coast.

    Something else to watch.

    The above 2 are in Addition to the interesting set up for the 4th or 5th.

    One of these should materialize into something.

    Fun times ahead for weather geeks, snow lover or not.

  18. So far I’m not feeling the one early next week as being much of a snow threat for this area, but I am for somewhere in the first week of April.

  19. I take it that the models that are predicting all the snow for April are different than the models that couldn’t shoot straight during most of the winter? 😉

    1. Certain models did very well in certain situations this Winter. My outlook on the switch to colder for early April is not solely based on current runs of operational models. This is being arrived at by studying the large scale pattern in the northern hemisphere, including several atmospheric and oceanic indices. 🙂

  20. Response to a question by Eric Fisher on twitter with the storm POTENTIAL 3/29
    Looks potent either way. One outcome TS and wind, the other heavy wet snow. Not really buying weak GFS solution at the moment.

    1. Looks potent on the euro? If so, I’d be cautious of any euro outcome that is potent. Seems to be overamplifying everything lately.

    2. What the hell does TS mean? Tropical Storm?
      Tough Shit? Think Snow? Or is the an O missing and it is OUT TO SEA?

      😀 😀 😀

  21. My trust for the ECMWF is not as high, at the moment, as it has been. I think they need to tweak a few knobs.

  22. Anyone know what Boston received April 29 1987. I know we had 10-12 in framingham.

    I liked Eric’s take on people thinking winter is over when March 21 hits….well some think it is over before.

    Longshot, were you able to reach your friends??

    1. I believe Boston had about 4 inches on April 28-29 1987. Much of it fell during the night of April 28.

  23. Boston (Logan) has recorded 26 storms in their period of record March 18 or later that have produced at least 3 inches of snow. Of those, 9 storm produced 6 inches or more, and 2 of them produced a foot or more.

    The measurable snows later than March 17 that were under 3 inches were too numerous to count. 😀

  26. 4 major things (and there are more besides this) driving the medium to long range pattern…

    1) Stratospheric Warming: Dr. Cohen addresses this is his blog. This will have a direct impact on AO and alter the pattern, delaying what would have been a warmer start to middle of April.

    2) ENSO: El Nino has been fading slowly in central areas of its region, and a little more quickly in eastern areas. The fade of this has been a little slower than expected, but will continue. Signs still point to a La Nina, but the onset may be slightly delayed from what the thinking was before.

    3) MJO: Ok, this particular index will not have much of an impact, as it is essentially going neutral for a while. There are 8 phases of MJO. The neutral phase, which we don’t see too often, is what I like to call “phase zero”. 😉

    4) AMO: Atlantic Multi-decadal oscillation. I’ll include a decent link that explains this and just say here that it runs in long phases, of which we are currently in the warm phase. However, it has been observed that warm phases have cold spikes in them, and cold phases have warm spikes in them. We are entering a cold spike within the warm phase which may last well into if not through Summer. The impact on the overall weather is a little unclear, though I don’t think it will overcome some of the other indices at work, but one thing that I do think may be a larger impact is for the Atlantic Hurricane Season to be a near no-show for 2016. So while many will (and some already have) sound the warnings of the season of doom to come, it may be anything but – at least in terms of the number of storms. We all know that it only takes one storm to do big things. Recall the 1992 lack-of-hurricane season, which included Andrew, and very little else. And then we had the recent season with a record number of storms but fairly minimal impact on the US landmass based on what one may have expected. Anyway, here is the AMO info link… It is from Wikipedia which has pulled together decent info on the subject. Still a lot to learn.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_multidecadal_oscillation

    2. If you really want to knock yourself out take a look at this PDF on the subject
      by David Enfield, Chunzai Wang, Sang-ki Lee
      NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Lab Miami, Florida
      Enfield, D.B., A.M. Mestas-Nuñez, and P.J. Trimble, 2001: The Atlantic multidecadal
      oscillation and its relationship to rainfall and river flows in the continental U.S..
      Geophys. Res. Lett., 28: 2077-2080.
      Goldenberg, S.B., C.W. Landsea, A.M. Mestas-Nuñez, and W.M. Gray, 2001: The
      recent increase in Atlantic hurricane activity: Causes & implications. Science.
      Enfield, D.B., and L. Cid-Serrano, 2006: Projecting the risk of future climate shifts.
      Int’l J. Climatology, 26: 885-895.
      Wang, C., S.-K. Lee, and D.B. Enfield, 2008: Climate response to anomalously large and small Atlantic warm pools in summer. J. Climate 2437-2450.
      Some relevant publications:
      Luis Cid-Serrano, Dept. Statistics, Universidad de Concepción, Chile

      http://www.wcrp-climate.org/decadal/rsmas_decadal/talks/Day2/Enfield_rsmas.pdf

    2. I think the warm spot Taunton hits 63 or 64 with a touch of sun, otherwise 50s to around 60 on the southern side of the front.

  28. I know, this blog usually stays away from politics, but I do not think this is a one sided view point, I am happy that I live in the Western Hemisphere, In the USA, We have a major boarder called the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean. We have always been a diverse culture, and generally accepting culture .As part of the culture here, there is a mix of everything in moderation at least here in the Northeast. In Europe, there are more strict divides and anger, it is very easy for people to get from place to place. There is very little stopping terrorists from getting from the Middle east to Europe. So despite the crap going on in politics, despite on who may or may not get nominated, we should be all proud and happy that we are indeed in one of the safer places in the country in terms of terrorism.

    1. Matt, I don’t think saying we should be proud of our country is politics. I think it is important to say, especially on days like today. I’m also proud that we stand with our allies for all is good. We really have no idea what terrorism is on the scale of Europe and other countries for the reasons you gave. And for that I am thankful for us but heartsick for all others.

      1. not saying being proud of our country is politics, I am saying the situation of terrorism is politics. People have strong opinions of the matter

    2. They are already here man…at least 40 states have sleeper cells waiting. Mexico is wide open and they have been crossing over for years. Just a matter of time unfortunately.

      1. Youngsters. They are here. We have to be alert at all times. You want Diversity, go south, just my opinion. Mass is 70% white

        1. I didn’t mean youngsters to many. And didn’t mean it to be rude. But it’s true the older you get the smarter you become

            1. You r life smarter yes!! You always think you know when your 20 or 30 yrs old, but you learn quickly as you get older 🙂

              1. I’m old enough to value the views of the younger folks. Matt is better informed than many older I know. And I don’t think age has anything to do with wisdom. Remember, we antiques are the ones who made the mess this country is in ;).

          2. I know what your saying and I agree. Or the right word may be you get wiser. Good comment Charles. Man you’ve spent to much time on your phone while away lol.

            1. Ha! Probably but really not that much, I Check, comment and shut off. So it’s quick 🙂

  29. oh and while I procrasinate in doing my chemistry, that possible system for the 29th period, I just would mention it, wouldn’t get to glued into any solution as anything can happen , so to get excited and then turns out to be a dud.

    1. I think that system will be a progressive rain-producer on March 28 with fair weather on March 29.

  30. The March roller coaster temperature ride is loading now…
    Wednesday: lower 50s Cape Cod to lower 60s interior southern suburbs of Boston.
    Thursday: upper 30s Boston northward along the coast and across southeastern NH, lower to middle 40s elsewhere.
    Friday: middle 50s to lower 60s.
    Saturday: middle 40s to lower 50s.
    Sunday: middle 50s to lower 60s.

  31. Nice job keeping it civil. When it is weather or strays a bit off topic, that’s all I ask. Everyone has opinions, just continue to be nice and it works well. 🙂

    A new blog is available. Have a great day all!

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