Winter Storm Nears East Coast with Snow and Uncertainty Ahead
A potentially disruptive winter storm expected to move across the eastern United States later this week could bring snow to the Appalachians, the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, but forecasters warned on Monday that it was too early to know exactly how the complicated system would unfold.
After a stretch of unseasonably mild weather over the eastern United States, cold air was forecast to push south from Canada beginning Wednesday. That will set the stage for a storm to develop that could bring a wintry mix before changing to snow across parts of the Mid-Atlantic and New England on Thursday and Friday, according to forecasters.
The storm's evolution depends largely on where it forms, a detail on which some weather models disagreed at the start of the week.
But by Tuesday, it was becoming more clear that the East Coast likely would be spared a major snowstorm.
Bob Oravec, a meteorologist at the Weather Prediction Center, said on Monday that some forecast models showed the storm forming over land, while others had it offshore. When forecast models agree in the lead-up to a storm, meteorologists can be fairly confident when they start to tell people what it will probably do. But when the models predict a broad range of outcomes, as they are here, each day closer to the storm brings a slightly better sense of what is likely to happen.
