Weather Porn

Yup, that’s what some of us jokingly call what the models have been indicating the last several runs in the past 24-30 hours: a monster snowstorm for PA this weekend! It’s had us snow-lovers drooling and absolutely giddy all day! Usually “weather porn” is something we just laugh at as some far-fetched and ridiculous output of a model that predicts the perfect scenario for us to get an outlandishly huge storm in one model run, and we don’t expect to see it ever again in any future runs (or in reality, for that matter). Here’s a textbook example of weather porn, a Penn State e-Wall display of the 06Z GFS run this morning, valid for 12Z Sunday (and you don’t even have to be a meteorologist to tell that it looks like something big and impressive is happening!):

This time has given every indication of being different, however. Most of the models are in rather marked and consistent agreement (for this far out, especially) that there’s gonna be a low pressure system moving out of the deep south and up the Atlantic coastline, with the strong temperature gradient between the cold land and the warm ocean leading to what’s called bombogenesis — explosive deepening of the low pressure system. While it might not bomb out as ridiculously much as the model run above, it still looks like a powerful winter storm. In any case, as the system starts to bomb out, it’ll cause massive amounts of precipitation in the mid-Atlantic states and throughout the Northeast, and it’s consistently looking like the track is gonna be one that’s very favorable for heaps of snow here in central PA late Saturday and into Sunday. Seriously, we’re talkin north of a foot here! The projected precip amounts were even more than that earlier today (2-3 feet?!?), but hey, I won’t really complain about a foot of snow (even though I managed to do just that in the Valentine’s Day 2007 storm…). Let’s hope this verifies, I’m stoked for the chance at a big snow!!
Congrats to Mario & Petters, who both passed their comprehensive exams today!
And 4th floor Walker didn’t actually smell much of smoke yesterday. The only place that had an odor of it was the corner of 4th floor that’s down by 401. And the damage wasn’t anything picture worthy, as it was very minimal.