After being rather persistent for much of the afternoon, lake effect snow will quickly fall apart this evening. A weak area of low pressure will pass by to our south tonight (across Pennsylvania) and that will disrupt the flow in the lower atmosphere. In fact, the winds should become very light in the lowest couple of thousand feet of the atmosphere over us. It appears that as this happens, the lake effect will quickly weaken. The snows will linger longest along the shoreline of Wayne, northern Cayuga and Oswego counties where there could be an additional accumulation of up to 6” tonight
Tomorrow should start dry with even some sunshine but clouds will be racing in from the west during the afternoon as a new, weak storm system approaches from the Great Lakes. This system won’t have a lot of moisture to work with so we aren’t expecting much in the way of accumulation as it moves through on Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, this system will be departing and our chances for snow will quickly drop.
The pace of systems moving across the northern tier of the country is rather quick so already by Thursday we will watch for the next weak system to move close to central New York with some snow by Thursday afternoon. Here is where some discrepancies show up from our computer models. Most have a second area of low pressure moving through the southern part of the United States and harmlessly moving it out to sea Friday. However one of our models, the European, strengthens this southern low quite a bit and brings it farther north. If this scenario were to pan out we might get more than the light snow we are forecasting presently for Friday. Stay tuned.
Whatever happens Friday, a large area of high pressure will build into the Northeast to start the weekend. As the high moves off the coast later Sunday, our winds will turn into the south and we will begin to import milder air into central New York. In fact, by Monday we should be in the 40s. That means our next chance for precipitation Monday will be in the form of rain.
