Sunday, March 3, 2019 CT Snow

Unfortunately I was not able to write a blog for the snow event of Friday, March 1, 2019, however, my forecast totally busted...it was way off. My forecast was just way too high. After looking back at everything I realized I should have not gone that high. There were numerous red flags for totals to reach those heights and I overlooked them. With that said...I will not let the same thing happen this time, even though the potential does exist for higher totals. Why won't I be aggressive this time?

The 500mb pattern is awful looking. This level (about 18,000 feet off the ground) is what sort of drives the weather...this is where the main jet stream is located, this is where energy moves through the atmosphere and it is this energy which helps create weather systems. When we look at 500mb vorticity and winds the flow is pretty flat and fast and there are numerous pieces of vorticity instead of a nice consolidated piece and we have a rather elongated piece of vorticity to our northwest:

There are no closed lows at 700mb (about 10,000 feet off the ground) and while we do see a closed low at 850mb this will help generate a band of heavy snow and the question is how far north this gets. You can tell the closed off look by that really tiny circle within the black circled area on the graphic on the right:

The Friday night system, tracking as far south and east as it did also likely set up a baroclinic zone in which this system would most likely follow along.

Water vapor imagery shows our system is currently over the CO area. Going back to the initial image of the 500mb jet stream and vorticity, with the flow nearly zonal (west-to-east(ish) it's tough to see this really gaining latitude. This will likely indicate a track far enough south and east to keep heavy banding to extreme SE CT (and perhaps even farther south and east than this):

What to expect:

• Snow breaks out 5:00 - 8:00 PM west to east across the state.
• Heaviest happens during the overnight.
• May see some initial mixing across SE CT, however, any mixing will transition to all snow.
• Snow is out by 8:00 AM Monday morning.
• Delays likely for the Monday morning commute (especially SE CT)