Hello everyone!

Our stretch of unsettled weather will continue today as the remnants of Hurricane Zeta race into the Mid-Atlantic and join forces with a winter storm over Texas.

I don’t often share satellite imagery on the blog here but this is just too spectacular to neglect. Zeta is visible racing east-northeast through the Carolinas ahead of the winter storm back over TX/OK. Note that the system as a whole is elongated along an east-west axis. This is key to our forecast for tonight/tomorrow.

Radar imagery shows rain from this storm falling across PA/NJ and just starting to move into NY/CT. Because the storm is so elongated, northward progress of the rain shield will be relatively slow. With that in mind, I’m not expecting rain to start falling in southwestern NH until around noon. Rain will then slowly march northeast, arriving in Maine around 2-4 PM. The mountains and southern York County are likely to see precip first before the rain shield fills in for the foothills and the rest of the coastal plain.

Because clouds (and some patchy fog) have already moved in ahead of the storm, I’m not expecting temps to rise a whole lot today. With current readings in the mid-30s, this naturally raises the question of how exactly our precipitation will make it to the ground.

High resolution model forecasts show precipitation starting off as rain except for the very highest mountains (above 3,000 feet). However, note the north winds developing around this time which will begin to push colder air into the region. As the sun sets, cooling will accelerate and snow levels will begin to fall.

By early tomorrow morning, snow will be falling all the way to the coastline but precipitation will be sagging off to the south again (remember our east-west elongated system makes it hard to push precip north).

This will overall keep snowfall accumulations to under an inch or two outside perhaps some of the higher hills/mountains in NH (particularly SW NH).

High temps today will range from around 32 in the north to around 42 in southern NH.

-Jack