Well there may not be a white Christmas for the East Coast but it’s looking likely from the Ohio Valley to the Mid-Mississippi River as a major storm system bombs out over Lake Huron Christmas Day. This WILL cause travel headache, particularly if your flying as winds will be whipping across a very large swathe of the country which will force delays at airports from Chicago to New York.

Unless we’ve a sharp eastward shift in track, it’s likely to be a warm and wet Christmas for the Big I-95 cities and predominantly east of the Appalachians but from the Appalachians on west, precipitation may start as rain and turn to snow once the bomb lifts into Canada.

The biggest story with this system will probably be wind as well as flooding rain with some severe weather over the Southeast. Even some late day snow reaching northern Alabama and Georgia as the cold air punches in.

Gusts could widely reach 30-40, locally 50 mph with exposed areas in favourable areas clocking 60 mph gusts. On the colder backside, we could see near blizzard conditions over parts of the Lower Midwest and Ohio Valley.

Here’s the latest GFS surface.

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Flooding rain is likely within the warm sector as tropical moisture lifts north. Snow will fall heavy with blowing and drifting on the cold backside.

Check out the sea level pressure chart. Impressive.

10m wind gusts

Note the snow cover seen by the GFS later on later on Christmas Day.

Yep, the North Georgia Mountains could see a few inches, making for an unusual White Christmas here as well as adjacent mountains of Tennessee and the Carolinas.

As your well aware, the cold pattern is setting up nicely as we head towards 2015 with similarity to the beginning of 2014 when all the talk was on the polar vortex.

Check out the below ‘snow on the ground’ projections off the GFS. See how the model covers the majority of the continent in snow. This would mean far less moderation of the arctic-Siberian air masses as they drive southward in wave fashion.

The 500mb height anomaly charts off the GFS operational haven’t changed. They push the strongest heights up into the far north while the trough underneath continues to deepen as it’s flooded by very cold air.

More tomorrow. Be sure to watch the video for today’s discussion.

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