Boom or bust? What to know about possible snow this weekend in the Northeast

Joining us in the weather center with the detail up, I see some of the raindrops behind you. Yeah, we've got a couple of raindrops on our camera lens here as we look live on Sky 6 toward the Ben Franklin Bridge. We've got the raindrops, we've got the clouds, and we've got temperatures in the 40s. Today our wind direction coming in out of the east-northeast, so we've just been stuck in the clouds all day here. We have a round of showers moving through now, and then we have the steady rain that comes through Friday morning. The heaviest rainfall at this point is still to our south. You can see it down toward the Baltimore area. We're watching as some of these showers kind of work their way southwest to northeast here. Everything that you're seeing is pretty light in intensity, but we have a few hours where we're going to be dealing with these showers as they work their way to the north and east. So, showers through this evening. We get a little bit of a breather, and then we're going to kind of reload things as we head into early tomorrow morning. You can see some of the steadier pockets of rain. This is around 6, 7 o'clock in the morning. The good thing to note is that our temperatures are going to be above freezing, the exception up into the Poconos. So, if you're traveling the northeast extension, say once you get north of the Lehigh Tunnel, that's where you can deal with a little bit of snow and freezing drizzle. For the rest of us, it's a steady soaking rain. By lunchtime, a lot of this is moving offshore, but the clouds are still going to be pretty stubborn here, and notice our temperatures in the upper 30s into the low 40s, so very similar to what we've had today. How much rain are we expecting? A pretty good consensus amongst the models. This is what we like to see when we're showing you model output that everything's kind of in the same agreement. About a half of an inch to three quarters of an inch possible, and that's taking tonight's timeframe through early Friday morning. We need the rain around here. A lot of people are surprised to hear that because we've had snow on the ground for several weeks, and that's because, well, keep in mind the ground is frozen right now, and all of that snow is melting, and because the ground is frozen, you get more of runoff rather than absorption into the ground, so our drought monitor that updated today, now showing a severe drought throughout Berks County, the Lehigh Valley, up into the Poconos, so tonight's rain and tomorrow morning's rain is going to be beneficial. Saturday, the sunshine returns. It's going to be a great day to get outside. We're calling it the pick of the weekend with a high of 50 degrees, and then our attention shifts to the weekend storm, Sunday, and we're going to show you the model comparison here, just two different models. There's more than two models, but the two that we're showing you, the GFS, this is the one that shows more of a storm hugging along the coast. It generates its own cold air, and this is what's bringing the potential of a foot of snow. That's what this model is suggesting. Then we have the European model. This is going to be more of a weaker solution, and this is going to likely head more out to sea, so you're not seeing that significant snowfall event, but it's still an impactful event with several inches of snow, so if we break things down, the major storm that's less likely, the GFS that I just showed you, it's showing over a foot of snow with blizzard conditions, 50 miles per hour winds, beach erosion, coastal flooding, really the worst case scenario, but what we're favoring right now is a minor storm which is more likely, so we're likely looking at a few inches of snow, breezy conditions at the coast, and less impact for travelers, which would be a good thing. Your exclusive AccuWeather 7 day forecast, a wet morning tomorrow, drier during the afternoon, Saturday is the pick of the weekend, the high is 50 degrees, then on Sunday we have our storm, and we're looking at wet snow developing by midday, that continues into early Monday morning, 38 degrees, and then the sunshine returns on Tuesday. Whatever falls is going to be melting, because we're up to 50 degrees by next Thursday. I like that. Yeah, can't have any more snow sticking around. It's been here a while. It's been too long, you got it. Brittany, thanks.