BLOG: Watching And Waiting

Fairly windy and most temperatures won't be quite as high as they were Wednesday afternoon.

A low pressure system located off the New England Coast early Thursday is causing a brisk northwesterly wind all the way up and down the coast (from Massachusetts to Virginia), and that wind will make it "feel like" its in the upper-20s at times this afternoon. Those gusty winds should diminish tonight, with clearing occurring in most places. Temperatures should wind up in the 20s, except the teens in a few of the typically colder suburbs.

Tomorrow, there will be less wind and a decent amount of sunshine. Anticipate dry weather tomorrow, tomorrow night and on Christmas Day as a ridge of high pressure slides across the mid-Atlantic states and eventually off shore. There's still no real true consensus amongst the global models regarding the coastal storm, which has been talked so much about for later on Sunday, Sunday night and Monday. The upper-air feature that will eventually cause a low pressure system to form in the southern Plains late tonight and tomorrow has now moved through Southern California, and it'll be drifting across the southern Rockies today. With a network of surface and upper-air observations that can be plugged into these models, we would think that at some point during the next 24 hours, there will be more of a consensus reached, and it would be easier to determine whether or not snow will occur Sunday night into Monday...or not.

However, while the G.F.S. model is trending a little farther north and west with its storm track on Sunday and Monday, it still doesn't move along a path as close to the coast as the European model solution does -- nor does it have it as deep. So, we're going to continue to watch this low pressure system as it develops over the next couple of days. Christmas Day will offer increasing and thickening clouds with highs in the mid-30s, and then the storm Sunday and Sunday night will either bring snow to areas as far west as the I-95 corridor, or it'll simply just graze the Eastern Shore before it slams eastern New England with heavy snowfall on Monday. Regardless of whether or not it snows Sunday night and Monday, there should be a fairly brisk wind that will make it feel colder... Have a good day !!!