Good Morning…

Long forecasting day for  me…12:47am, still in the forecast center at WPRI.  I was waiting for one of the updated global forecast models (called the GFS) to come in. The map below is the new GFS  valid for Sunday 8am…This new output still shows a major storm  heading out to sea away from New England….however, when comparing it to previous runs, it  has shifted the track further west and closer to the coast…interesting.  The concentric circles on the map (isobars), shows the  forecast location of the storm center. Over the next couple of days, we will look to see if this westward shift closer to the coast continues. Now this is only one of many computer models that are updating at this hour (the others have not trickled in yet), so to latch on to only one model output and run with it, is not how the forecast method is played….but, I did want to point out how this new GFS model was handling things. In my previous post, I talked about “retrograding“.  Sometimes offshore storms will move in reverse towards the coast. Usually storm systems will have a west to east component of movement, but in some cases, the storm will reverse itself and move from east to west.  A number of  weather factors across the continental United States and North Atlantic will need to come together to pull the storm in “reverse” and have it head back closer to coast. We may not have a good handle on this until later Thursday or Friday. “If” we get an impact from this storm, it would be in the late Sunday-Monday time frame….Tony Petrarca