New York, Get Ready for Another Snow-Dumping Nor'easter

(Bloomberg) -- New York and the Northeast will greet spring with the fourth nor’easter in three weeks and a blanket of heavy, wet snow from Philadelphia to Boston.

Snow will start late Tuesday, pelting New York commuters with 5 to 11 inches (13 to 28 centimeters) by the time the storm ends on Thursday, according to a winter storm watch from the National Weather Service. Boston is likely to get 8 to 12 inches, Philadelphia 10 inches and Trenton, New Jersey, a foot. Washington will begin with rain and freezing rain Tuesday, but may end up with 2 to 4 inches of snow, said Brian Hurley, a senior branch forecaster at the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

“It will be a mess to bring in spring,” Hurley said by telephone. The season begins Tuesday in the Northern Hemisphere. “This is number four taking it from the first day of March. It is unusual but not unprecedented,” he said.

Three storms have already ripped across the Northeast this month, dropping snow by the foot from just outside New York to Boston. More than 2 million customers were without power during the worst of them, which also caused high seas and flooding along the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to New Jersey. More than 9,100 flights were canceled across the U.S., according to FlightAware in Houston.

Amtrak, Airlines

The new storm, which is forecast to bring winter weather from western North Carolina to Massachusetts, will likely cause problems for Amtrak and airlines. As of 4 p.m. Monday, flights Tuesday out of Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport had been canceled, according to FlightAware.

Boston may get as much as 8 inches of snow by the Wednesday afternoon commute, with another 4 coming after sunset, said Bill Simpson, weather service meteorologist in Taunton, Massachusetts. The Massachusetts weather service office is scheduled to move to neighboring Norton as the storm comes north.

The snow’s weight will likely mean more trees and power lines falling, causing outages throughout the area, Simpson said. Towns along Interstate 95 and Boston’s South Shore could get less because the storm will initially start as rain.

Before arriving in the Northeast, though, a storm system that may turn into the nor’easter will almost certainly bring “headline-grabbing” thunderstorms and tornadoes late Monday from Nashville, Tennessee, to Birmingham, Alabama, said Dave Samuel, a meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc. in State College, Pennsylvania. “It could even be the biggest severe weather outbreaks of this year,” he said.

Pacific Disturbance

That system is expected to bring slushy snow Tuesday to Appalachia as it moves toward the East Coast, where it’s poised to join with an upper-level disturbance currently moving off the Pacific Ocean into California and forecast to whip across the continent. If the two pieces come together the right way, then a large nor’easter could form, Samuel said.

Heavy rains could cause mudslides and floods around Los Angeles, the weather service said.

Adding to the situation is an abundance of cold air available to turn any precipitation into snow, said Gary Best, a meteorologist at Hometown Forecast Services Inc. in Nashua, New Hampshire. A block in the atmosphere over Greenland, which helped spur the past storms, is still in place, he said, adding that “as long as the Greenland block is there, these storms are going to keep coming at us.”

While it’s still a bit early to say, another potential storm could hit the East Coast early next week, Best said.

“It could be a hit or a miss, but the way things have been going this year, it will probably be more of a hit than a miss,” he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Doan at ldoan6@bloomberg.net, Margot Habiby, Will Wade

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