Everything about 2022 appears to be unpredictable thus far.
Just over 24 hours into the new year Salisbury has received nearly an inch of rain after a prolonged dry spell. We’ve experienced windy conditions and a thunderstorm and to top it all off, we recorded a record high temperature of 68 degrees as we approached midnight last night. What happens next?
As one who often makes references to rock lyrics from the past I keep saying to myself:
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know.
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead,
Just like Grace Slick belted out in her haunting classic, “White Rabbit”, with Jefferson Airplane in 1967, perhaps logic has fallen “sloppy dead”.
If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, sbywx.blog, then you know that I’m going to give you a chance to listen to the song as performed on “The Smothers Brothers Show”in 1967.
You can’t get a lesson in conditional logic and a rock history lesson within your weather forecast on TV. I hope you’ll refer your friends here.
There is a winter storm watch in place for our area. Rain this morning and windy conditions are on tap for Delmarva with another high temperature in the 60’s today.
Rain should redevelop this evening and persist throughout the overnight hours, heavy at times, as the temperatures begin their fall into the 30’s. The rain is expected to mix with snow.
Forecasters are in agreement that heavy wet snow will likely reach the lower shore by the morning rush hour on Monday.
The biggest unknown really is how much snow can possibly stick on grounds that have become saturated under 60 degree conditions. It would take a heavy snow, as predicted, to accomplish that.
Here is a possible scenario from the ECMWF (Euro) weather model.
The GFS weather model says that a foot of snow is not out of the realm of possibility.
Having grown up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore I can say that this southern storm tract, coupled with a blast of Canadian air, is the so-called perfect storm scenario for residents of Delmarva. These things rarely happen, but when they do, Salisbury and points south can often get a dumping of snow while Baltimore gets nothing.
Here is an animated run of the GFS model as of 6 AM this morning. It calls for a more significant accumulation of snow in our area than does the often more reliable ECMWF model pictured at the top of this post.
The one certainty is that the scenario is likely to be tweaked throughout the day. I will make sure to post an update this afternoon. It is important to me that you get your money’s worth!