If you want a humbling profession try weather forecasting! The storm that has not behaved in the way anyone thought it would behave has finally settled into a more predictable mode, bringing a blanket of snow across the city. The center of the storm is way out over the ocean, and the deep layer of moist, maritime air the storm is throwing our way is being drawn upwards by a passing upper level disturbance. That's what's producing the snow.

Danbury, Connecticut, northern Westchester, Putnam and Orange Counties all had over a foot of snow overnight. That disturbance is moving out to sea and getting absorbed into the larger storm. As it does so, we'll see the snow change to rain this afternoon before finally dissipating this evening. The storm might be able to squeeze out another inch or so of snow before switching over to rain. Of more concern today is the wind. A tight pressure gradient will produce a steady 20-25 mph breeze with higher gusts for the rest of the day before slowly diminishing overnight.

For completely different weather stick around for the weekend. As high pressure arrives, clear skies will prevail. Saturday and Sunday should be warm, with highs right around 50 degrees. In a sign that Spring is near, the weekend warming is largely solar heating, rather than any warm air mass moving in. As a warmer air mass arrives next week temperatures in the city should warm to the mid 50s on Monday and Tuesday. Beyond that expect a few showers and then a slight cooling by mid week.

So, what went wrong with this week's forecast? To answer that, look back to last week's storm. The dip of the jet stream that produced that storm got stuck over the North Atlantic. As the trough guiding this week's storm moved toward the East Coast a contorted ridge of high pressure formed between the troughs. Until Wednesday none of the forecast models had that ridge forming, so they all had the storm moving up the coast and out of the region by yesterday. Instead the blocking ridge shunted the storm too far out to sea to dump much snow on us. At the same time the ridge didn't allow the storm to leave, so it had an extra day to produce the deep layer of moisture that last night's shortwave needed to drop all the snow. That's my take on it. I'll be interested to see if a post-mortem analysis of the storm gets written up.