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CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers has been monitoring the paths of two combining storms that could be the biggest storm of its kind, a so-called nor'easter.
Q: As you've been forecasting, some Northeast residents will get rain and some will get snow, and lots of it. Will the rain be freezing rain?
MYERS: In many spots we could get sleet and freezing rain mixing in before we change back over to snow. So there could be a layer of ice, especially on bridges and overpasses like the I-95 corridor.
Q: Please explain what a nor'easter is and how this one might stack up with previous nor'easters.
MYERS: A nor'easter is a coastal storm. There's a little weather phenomenon because the water is so warm off the East Coast and the cold air that comes down from Canada; they don't like to mix. And when cold air tries to come down and warm air tries to come up you get an intensifying low pressure center and that spin really gets going. We call it "cyclo-genesis," in fact, and it just makes the low bigger and bigger and bigger, it becomes a bomb. The reason we call it a nor'easter is because the winds eventually come from the Northeast. It's just an old weather term that the sailors used to use.
This is going to be a long-duration storm. What I mean by that is, it starts tonight (Sunday night), already a little bit of snow already and then we turn over to some rain in New York City. We turn back over to snow and it continues to snow all the way through Wednesday. So significant winds up to 50 miles per hour, 24 inches of snow in some spots. This could be the biggest one of the year so far for sure, and we've already had three.
Q: What are the indications that point to this storm being so bad?
MYERS: We have computer models -- almost like the model of a car. You buy a model at any store of a car and you want it to look like a car when you're done. Weather models are the same type of thing, but they're all on computers. The model tries to (illustrate) the atmosphere. It tries to come up with a close facsimile of what it thinks the weather is going to be 48 hours from now. And these "what-we-think's-going-to-happen" models tell us that there's just going to be significant snow all up in the Poconos the Catskills all the way up to the Berkshires.
RELATED STORIES:
Nor'easter threatens 2 feet of snow
March 5, 2001
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Northeast storm dumps up to a foot of snow
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National Warnings Area
National Weather Service
NYS Emergency Management
National Snow and Ice Data Center
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