The meteorology behind this weekend’s Nor’Easter
This winter has not had a fair share of wintry events. The snowfall we have received has generally come from clipper systems, and the larger storm systems have been rain. But the weather pattern is changing towards one that favors major east coast storm development and potentially large snowfall events. It is not a slam-dunk by any means, since there are a lot of moving parts, but the pattern over the next few weeks certainly piques the interest of any meteorologist looking for potential winter weather events.
One of the main problems for getting major snowstorms this winter has been the very fast flow across the Pacific and Atlantic basins. This means that any large storm that tried to amplify would get flattened out, as any ridging in the Pacific would get flattened like a pancake. This is going to change as we head towards this weekend.