Hello everyone!

Today will feature the beginning of a warming trend that will continue as our next storm rolls through the area tonight and tomorrow. The storm will be tracking to the west of the region, which means that aside from some light snow/sleet/freezing rain associated with the leading edge of the precipitation, this one will be all rain.

That leading-edge icy precipitation will arrive later this afternoon, but it will be very light and is only expected to last for a couple hours at most. If you’re headed out and about after 7 PM, especially away from the coastline, watch out for isolated slick spots but otherwise you’ll barely notice the couple flakes or ice pellets. Steadier and heavier precipitation arrives later tonight, and will almost exclusively fall as rain except perhaps for the coldest mountain/foothill valleys where light icing will continue until tomorrow morning.

High temps today will range from 30 in the mountains to 45 along the NH Seacoast.

Curious why the storm tonight/tomorrow is expected to be mostly/all rain? Here’s a snapshot of one of the tools I use to figure out if it’s going to rain or snow. The shading depicts moisture content, with blue indicating dry air and green/red indicating moist air. Maine is firmly on the “moist” (east) side of the storm system, the center of which is tracking through the Hudson Valley. The moist side of the storm is also the warm side of the storm, and the airmass forecast to be over Maine tomorrow can be traced back to the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda today.

With the storm passing to our west and air moving in from Bermuda, we can have high confidence that this one will end up mostly rain, even in the mountains.

Fellow snow lovers can take solace in the fact that this storm appears to be jolting our weather pattern back towards a more favorable configuration for cold air and snow, and there’s a pretty good chance most of the area ends up with a White Christmas (defined as >1″ of snow depth on Christmas morning or measurable snow accumulation >.1″ during Christmas Day).

-Jack