LVblizzard

I’ve never seen a storm as consistently modeled as January 2016. Aside from the 2 days of runs which suppressed the best snow south of Philly, the models were completely locked in on a huge snowstorm for a week and a half. I remember looking at a Euro ensemble run 10 days out with a big storm - which is wild to see on an ensemble mean that far out - and just knowing we’d have lots of long days and nights of tracking ahead. And then by day 7 every model run showed this monster storm crawling up the coast. I can’t remember any other storms that showed up day after day for so long like that.

Some parts of Allentown and Bethlehem just picked up a coating from a lake effect streamer.

CAD really working its magic keeping temps in the low 40s rather than near 50. Looks like that ice on my sidewalk and driveway will be sticking around for awhile.

Thank god that’s over. Just a brutal storm to track and experience. My least favorite in recent memory.

About an inch of a sleety mess here. I just shoveled it and cleared off my car and it was not fun.

I’m a dasher and not even thinking about heading out tonight, even with a $4 per order promo. I drive a FWD sedan and it would struggle hard on this ice.

What a weird ass storm…still sleet here in Allentown but snow to the south near Pottstown and also well to the north in NY. This is like the icing on the cake of this mess. Just impossible to predict this stuff.

As wacky as the NAM can be sometimes, it really does a good job with these mid level warm noses more often than not.

Freezing drizzle for a bit in Allentown, but it has changed back to sleet under the heavier echoes.

All sleet in Allentown. That was quick.

Starting as graupel in Allentown.

I have a hard time trusting this given how far north the sleet reports are in upstate NY into Canada.

I’m going with 1-3” for Allentown but it’s basically a crapshoot with how volatile that warm nose is. This is the type of storm where the airport sees nothing but sleet which barely accumulates an inch, while 20 miles away in Bangor they get 4-5”.

Latest NAM has nearly 2” of pure sleet at ABE airport. I’d almost rather have rain…almost. Still better than the ice storm they’ll be getting south and west of Harrisburg.

This forecast is a real PITA. Toughest one in awhile and probably one of the top 5 most difficult since I started forecasting on my page 14 years ago.

And it did. Virtually no snow even for the Poconos. Amazing that we’re less than 24 hours out and there’s this much disagreement. This is the definition of a nowcast event.

0z HRRR has 6” in Allentown and 4” down to Philly. Not buying it though…I’ve seen this before where the HRRR severely underestimates mid-level warm air. The NAM is about to come out and I’m pretty confident it’ll show something entirely different.

If you buy how dry the NAMs are…I personally don’t. Sleet ratios are typically around 3:1 and I think we get at least an inch of pure sleet, along with up to an inch of snow.

Been awhile since we had a big sleet bomb…looks like that will be happening tomorrow night. Still doesn’t compare to V-Day 2007, the mother of all sleet storms.

It sucks running a page with 13k followers during a storm like this. You barely have a clue but the people demand numbers and you just have to do your best.

None of the other 0z mesos look remotely like that NAM run. I'm tossing the NAM at this point as it's such a big outlier.

Forecasting this is like blindly throwing darts at the models and hoping one will be right. It's such a weird setup and the models apparently don't know how to handle it. You can't really look at past storms as analogs with this either because it's so rare to get storms like this.

Just under an inch in Allentown. Nice ground whitener. Now on to Friday!

I don’t really trust globals on the snow/mix line. We’ll have to wait another day or two for the hi-res models to come into range. What does look certain is that this will be an all or mostly frozen event for most of us. WWA just issued for Lehigh/Northampton counties for this morning. NWS expects 1-2” around here.

It’s virga. 0z hi-res models are slightly more aggressive for tomorrow. HRRR has 1-3” around I-78. Hoping to wake up to steady snow in the morning.