The National Weather Service is predicting 8.5 inches of snow will fall in Concord beginning early Friday afternoon.
“It’s gonna be that pasty, wet type of junk that will stick to everything,” said Tom Hawley, a meteorologist at the forecasting center in Gray, Maine. “So there are likely to be power outages.”
The snow will continue through Friday night and into Saturday afternoon, hitting the Monadnock region and areas to its north the hardest, Hawley said.
That region – including western Merrimack County towns like Bradford and Newbury – could receive as much as 18 inches of snow, he said.
“I know people don’t want it, but if we’re right on this forecast … there are likely to be power outages, especially in the higher terrain Monadnocks, northeast of Keene, north of Jaffrey,” Hawley said.
There may be “a little bit of sleet mixed in” for Concord, Hawley said; if not, the snow total could creep a bit higher.
As for the storm’s timing, crossing the threshold into April, he said: “It doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s not what I’d call unusual.”
The meteorologist called up the largest recorded snow events during the month of April in Concord and found one whopper on April 6, 1982, that delivered 13.3 inches.
That was far more powerful than the next highest, 8.6 inches on April 10, 1996. The most recent April storm that cracked the top 10 was 5.1 inches on April 4, 2007.
In 1971, a storm that dropped 5.2 inches of snow in Concord came at the very end of April on the 29th.
“That must have been a shocker to everybody,” he said.
Of course, this upcoming storm is expected to begin on the last day of March and end in April, so the city’s hopes of cracking into those record books could be dashed by poor timing.
It would be no consolation, either, if the relatively warm temperatures make for the type of snow that clings to tree branches – and weighs them down until they fall on power lines.
“It’s going to be heavy wet snow,” Hawley said, “so there are likely to be power outages.”
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)