Blizzard Coming

The NWS now has issued a Winter Storm Warning for Monday for our entire area.

I've been tracking east coast storms way back since the 1980s and I developed a formula for 14 things that you need to get 10 inches of snow to get in Philadelphia.

All 14 criteria have been met. That's why I think we will get 10 inches of snow here or a little more.

This will be a storm unlike any other that we've seen this season. I think the main difference is going to be the wind and I'm using a word that I haven't used in a forecast since 1996: blizzard.

I do not use this word lightly. We will have near blizzard conditions for Monday.

The winds must be sustained at 35 miles per hour. We believe the winds will range from 30 to 50 miles per hour at times on Monday.

Also we look for heavy falling or blowing snow, and visibility needs to be reduced less than a quarter mile.

All conditions that we listed here must exist for three hours or more, for a blizzard to happen. So we're looking at near-blizzard conditions that we are going to be facing.

There's a winter storm warning for much of the area. The exceptions are Cape May county and Sussex county in Delaware where an advisory is posted.

Pretty much the entire area is looking at this event. Tonight, we have clear conditions and low humidity, which allows very cold temperatures to remain in place.

Once the snow starts Monday morning it will cause the temperatures to drop even more.

On the winter Doppler, a tremendous area of moisture moving across Florida, they even had tornadoes in Florida today.

The leading edge shouldn't be here before 6:00 a.m. Monday at the very earliest.

By 8:00 a.m., the snow will be starting, probably in southern Delaware, moving rapidly up through the area and by early afternoon it's snowing pretty heavily.

It will be heavy snow, and any mix or changeover is going to be pretty well confined to southeastern portions of the area.

But by 8:00 p.m. Monday night the heavy snow is already moving out.

It is not going to be as long-lasting a storm as the blizzard of 1996, for example. But the snow is going to be coming down hard at times and we're predicting 10 to 15 inches of snow across much of the Philadelphia area.

So expect near blizzard conditions in the afternoon. On Tuesday, we continue to have wind with light snow.

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