Cancel your weekend flights.
And pray for JetBlue's customer service team.
Good morning everyone. Will I see any of you at Bug tonight?
Today’s newsletter includes: A party (and cigarette) report from David Zwirner last night, where to drink during a snowstorm in New York City, Gutes Guterman’s new job in tech, and a Hamptons middle school turning 8th grade boys into award-winning chefs.
This interview is part of a Feed Me feature called Guest Lecture. In this series, I introduce you all to an expert who I’m curious about, and give paid readers an opportunity to ask them anything they want. Past guests have included Andrew Ross Sorkin, Kareem Rahma, and Lina Khan.
Today, John Homenuk, the meteorologist behind NY Metro Weather, answers your questions about the storm hitting New York this weekend, and whether talking about the weather is actually boring.
Sorry to be lame but is there any bad weather expected Saturday or will it all be on Sunday? God bless. - Devin
Saturday looks just fine in NYC, with most of the storm starting on Sunday morning. Travel may be screwed by then in some spots though, as the storm will already be affecting a large part of the Southern US.
Seeing reports that there may be some mixing of precipitation at the end of the storm, but with the strong arctic high pressure delivering temps in the teens and the 20s… how likely is that really? - Sarah
This is the big uncertainty with this storm! Model guidance as of today has several inches of snow that then changes over to sleet before the storm ends. How fast that change to sleet occurs will determine how much snow we actually get. The thing about sleet is that it can occur even with a very cold temperature at the surface. Sleet forms when snow falls down from the cloud as a snowflake, but passes through a layer of warm air on the way to us. That layer melts it into a raindrop, and then it refreezes into an ice pellet as it reaches us at the surface. So it can be very cold down here, but if it’s warm between the cloud and us - we get sleet. I think we’ll ultimately see several inches of snow followed by sleet before the storm ends here in NYC.
Might this be the kind of storm in which city dwellers come out and play, or is it more of a stay inside kinda deal? - Jess
A little bit of both! There will be time to come out and play, but then things will change over to sleet in the evening on Sunday which makes for a really nasty situation.
I’m looking after my neighbors two kids in Brooklyn this Fri and Sat… they fly back from London to JFK on Sun. Will they make it? Or will public schools be closed on Monday and I’ll have 4 kids on my Zooms? - Bex
Sunday is going to be a really tough day for flights. This is a big storm affecting a lot of people, so regardless of how much snow we get here in NYC I expect that delays and cancellations will be pretty widespread.
Do you have a rule of thumb for how long before a potential weather event you wait before deciding to change plans, plane tickets, etc. 24 hours? 48 hours? (I’m supposed to fly to Madrid Sunday at 7 pm, and am very skeptical that this will be an actual snowpocalypse, but it’s a work trip, so trying to decide when I need to hedge my bets.)
If a Winter Storm Watch is issued for significant snowfall (like there is now for Sunday) and the storm is large, you are playing with fire by not moving your flight away from the storm. I’d strongly suggest considering making a change.