This is going to be interesting. We are likely to see over a foot of snow in a 50 mile swath on Saturday, but just south of that over an inch of freezing r@!n is likely. Aim wrong and you're screwed! On Sunday opportunity for aiming right will be limited in the Northeast, but you can likely avoid the r@!n and freezing r@!n then also. On Monday the opportunity for a successful hunt will likely be trying to hunt the dry slots. Models are starting to come into tighter agreement on Saturday, but Sunday and especially Monday are still up in the air though I do have recommendations based on probabilities.
This is an "anafront" type of system, basically warm moist air is moving north into a semi-stationary boundary, in this case northwest flow with the jet stream. Cold air is more dense so it gets scoured out close to the ground more slowly than aloft where the wind and the push of warm air and moisture is also stronger. This causes instability with an area of r@!n, then an area of freezing r@!n, then some sleet, and then a swath of snow. I did a bit of annotation on this standard form of graphic to demonstrate this.
Let me state clearly that according to modeling some areas may see over 1" of freezing rain on Saturday when the front is more stationary, and probably as much as .25" of freezing r@!n on Sunday with slowly moving front, and this will cause not just lift and terrain holds, but seriously bad travel conditions, blocked roads, and power outages especially on Saturday. Now if you hunt this safely and accurately, you may be greeted with over a foot of snow and this may be the last widespread big dump of the season for the Northeast. Yup, I just said that, but it will surely snow again this season.
So here's the broad view from the latest GFS from 5PM Friday through 5PM on Monday.
I'm going to break this down day by day to help our subscribers navigate the situation, and I'll cover the notable weather for each day but things will get more fuzzy on Sunday and again on Monday.
