‘Something I’ve never seen’: How forecasts for Saturday’s snowstorm perplexed a local meteorologist

Boston 25 Meteorologist Kevin Lemanowicz has been in the game for over three decades — spending the last 25-plus years in the city itself — and has certainly weathered his fair share of walloping New England winters.

But early Friday morning, on the eve of the region’s latest snowstorm, Lemanowicz encountered something unusual in his typical routine of waiting up for the latest computer forecast models.

“Like my fellow weather geeks, I’m up at 2 a.m. waiting for that European model to come in … and I’m looking at all the new high-resolution models that are coming in because once you get closer to the time period, some of the refined models start to come into play,” Lemanowicz told Boston.com by phone later in the day. “And they’re all consistently showing two to three feet of snow, and in some cases up over 40 inches … it’s just something I’ve never seen.”

Awestruck, the seasoned meteorologist expressed his amazement on Twitter: “I don’t even know what to make of it.”

The tweets capture just what a stunning doozy Saturday’s powerful nor’easter promises to be.

A blizzard warning was issued for much of eastern Massachusetts and the entirety of Rhode Island on Friday.

And local meteorologists are forecasting snow totals as high as 24 to 28 inches near the city — enough to possibly slip past the Boston area’s all-time record of accumulation of 27.6 set back in 2003. There’s even potential for over 30 inches of snow in parts of the south shore.

Lemanowicz admits he didn’t have the highest forecasted snow totals among the bunch Thursday night.

But the forecast models he saw hours later gave him something more to think about.

There tends to be a rogue model — an outlier from the pack — or two every storm, Lemanowicz explained. But he had never encountered such high snow totals across several models, “all in lockstep” before, he said.

“I saw this happening like, ‘Wow, you know, this is this may actually come to fruition,'” he said, a hint of wonder still lingering in his voice.

Lemanowicz appears to have passed on his amazement to hundreds of others on Twitter: His first tweet had garnered over 1,000 likes and 300 retweets by late afternoon.

Social media, he noted, is “not something I used to hype up a storm or get clicks or eyeballs or that kind of thing.

“That was just my honest thoughts out there last night, and I’m surprised a lot of people went and ran with it,” he added. “And I guess that’s a good thing.”