Let me put this bluntly, the storm looked kind of nasty yesterday, and it looks even nastier this morning. Outside of PA the best day of the holiday week may be Saturday so make the most out of it.
We have a cutter, a storm that tracks up through the Great Lakes, in this case cutting through WNY. That cutter will likely (not guaranteed) form a second low in the Gulf of Maine and transfer energy to it. This setup is known as a triple-point low and only the Longfellows of Maine (as well as Quebec) tends to love most of these storms but it creates a mixed bag of all sorts of stuff elsewhere in the Northeast.
That cutter low pushes moisture and warm air out in front of it but when the secondary low forms off the coast where an occluded front, a warm front, and a cold front all meet (the "triple point") it helps push cold air south to hold off the advance. This typically creates a large battleground of cold and warm air, and with that sleet and freezing r@!n.
Now if you are watching your weather apps (absolute garbage for tracking Northeast storms honestly) you will likely see some big changes from run to run for a location, but the issue is that small changes in when that low makes the jump to the coast will cause major changes at many locations in what type of precipitation falls, and how much of it falls. I can tell you that models often struggle with nailing down this jump to a secondary low, and they are struggling now. The trend is not good if you love snow, and as we already know there are strong winds and cold air behind this system that will cause lift operation issues through at least Tuesday. This is going to be tough for many, and while I can't influence the weather (our weather modification Kickstarter failed to reach our $50 billion goal) I can at least help prepare everyone for what will happen so that you can plan accordingly.
So here's the broad view from the latest ECMWF covering all of Saturday through Monday to get things going.
I'll be covering the Precipitation Forecast, the Wind Hold Forecast for Sunday through Tuesday, and lastly the Travel Forecast for Saturday and Sunday. I've decided to not split out the Monday and Tuesday coverage because there isn't a lot of snow on the back end of this system so that coverage will mostly focus on the wind.
