Here's the truth about the East Coast's 'blizzard for the ages' coming this weekend

Will the East Coast wake up Saturday morning under an immovable mountain of snow? Judging by the tone of some media coverage, you might think so.

A storm does seem to be brewing for the weekend of January 23, but the meteorologist we talked to told us not to believe the hype. While it will probably snow, we likely won't see much more than a foot of accumulation in any of the major East Coast cities, if that. There is a nonzero chance of a massive blizzard, but no reason to expect one either.

Tuesday morning, meteorologist Ryan Maue tweeted out a model of this weekend's storm that showed up to three feet of snowfall.

He called it a "blockbuster blizzard for the ages" with "crippling impacts":

Slate writer, meteorologist, and extreme weather enthusiast Eric Holthaus grabbed that quote and threw it into the headline of an article:

His article gets into the weeds of the forecast, and paints a scary picture. He tells readers that the storm will likely slow to a crawl off the Jersey shore at peak strength, leading to "whiteout conditions", "thundersnow" and "hurricane forces wind gusts". Most alarming of all, he refers to the "possibility of a historic snowfall" on the order of a 28 inch record-buster from 1922.

Holthaus seems especially concerned about damage to New York City:

We wondered how seriously East Coasters should take this frigid doomsday knell. According to Rich Otto, a lead forecaster with the National Weather Service in Washington D.C., not very.

"When it comes to social media people will take a model and run with it," he says, referring to the general tone of weather Twitter on this storm.

According to Otto, the East Coast should definitely prepare for a significant storm this weekend, but, "I wouldn't use words like 'historic'."

Otto pointed out that January is, in fact, the middle of winter, so it's not unusual to see a snow storm forming: "It's common to get these kinds of storms this time of year."

More unusual, Otto said, is that the East Coast hasn't seen much snow at all this season.

Part of the problem with all this storm hype, Otto said, is that too much is still unknown. Three or four days out from the main event, weather models are just too imprecise to make good judgments about snowfall or the storm's path.

Here's what Otto says we can expect:

Sometime Thursday night a snowstorm will arrive in the Tennessee Valley and proceed in one of three ways: along the East Coast, out west, or back to sea by Saturday morning.

In that time it will likely dump a sizeable amount of water along its path — which looks likely to center on Virginia. Where that precipitation falls, and whether it falls as snow, rain, or a slushy mix, will have a lot to do with an unpredictable low pressure system. (Low pressure systems tug on storms, pulling them along specific paths and changing their heat and moisture levels.)

Right now, Otto says it's unclear where that low pressure system will end up, which will have a big impact on the storm's effect.

If the storm does dump more than a foot of snow around D.C. it will certainly be a big deal. (Though Otto points out that happened as recently as 2009.) If it floods the New York subways, as Holthaus implied on Twitter, that would be an even bigger deal. But right now catastrophe doesn't seem especially likely.

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