Nor'easter on Halloween? A coastal storm could impact parts of New England next week
New England has had more than a few weather "tricks" on Halloween in recent years.
Extreme weather on Halloween
Since 2010, we have had four extreme weather events that have caused Halloween to either be canceled or postponed in many local towns.
Just six years ago we had a "Halloween Howler" with periods of heavy rain and wind gusts to 40mph.
There was another big windstorm in 2017, Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and who could forget "Snowtober" back in 2011.
Could history repeat itself?
Could history repeat itself again this year? Here's the deal...as of this writing, Halloween is more than a week away and in the weather world, that is nearly an eternity.
At this time range, our weather team is essentially just watching trends in the models and focusing more on large scale "movers and shakers" in the atmosphere, trying to put the pieces together.
Take a look at these long-range weather models. These show something we call ensembles, which essentially is the model being run over and over again with some tweaks to initial conditions.
All those "L's" and circles off the East Coast represent different model forecasts for the center or location of the storm. The solutions literally span hundreds if not thousands of miles.
Bottom line, there are still numerous possibilities and scenarios ranging from a raging nor'easter on Halloween day to a much more minor impact which could occur on a different day altogether.
Significant storm on East Coast
What we can say at this point is that there is likely to be some significant storm formation along the East Coast by the middle of next week.
Given this and the projected "trough" in the Northeast next week there is a chance of a coastal storm or nor'easter impacting parts of New England, hence why we are giving you an early heads-up.
Impacts, timeline
Where it forms, who it impacts, and the timeline for all of this remain question marks.
Worst case scenario, we get a second October nor'easter and another round of flooding rains and damaging winds.
One bit of good news, the tides are astronomically low in the time period, reducing the risk of any major coastal flooding.
As always, when our weather team knows something, we will immediately pass it on to you. We will have frequent updates on WBZ-TV and CBSBoston throughout the upcoming weekend and beyond.