How Much Snow Will We Get? Winter Storm Nika To Dump Up To 8 Inches In New York City, 5 On Long Island, 12 In Boston

It’s the snow that never ends. Just a day after many places in the New York area saw up to eight inches courtesy of Snow Storm Maximus, Nika (as The Weather Channel named the system) is expected to layer on another eight inches, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday, citing the National Weather Service.

The snow system started in the Great Plains, swept through the Midwest and is on its way to the Northeast, forcing the area to face its third round of brutal weather. New Yorkers can expect the snow to begin to fall on Wednesday just after midnight and continue into at least 3 p.m. But it’s not exactly going to be a soft winter wonderland. Nika is expected to bring an unpleasant mix of snow, sleet and freezing rain. In addition to the four to eight new inches NYC could see, the ground also is likely to be coated with one-tenth of an inch of ice.

The National Weather Service also issued warnings for areas from Massachusetts down to Pennsylvania. Boston could see as much as 12 inches of snow mixed with ice and though Philadelphia is expected to get an accumulation of only one inch of snow, a quarter of an inch of ice on ground is likely. There are additional warnings from midnight until 6 p.m. Wednesday, for the New York metro area, northeast New Jersey, southern Connecticut and especially upstate New York, where more than 20 inches of snow could fall in some locations.

In a press conference on Monday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio warned city-dwellers to prepare for an extremely icy week. Con Ed cautioned there could be power outages if snow causes fallen tree branches and downed power lines, the Daily News added.

"The fact is that we are facing not one, not two, but three storms potentially this week," De Blasio said at Monday's press conference. "Snow is coming down faster than we can plow it. We have a very aggressive plowing operation going on but snow is coming down very rapidly."

On Long Island, residents can expect to see up to five more inches of snow, according to experts. The National Weather Service issued a storm warning for Nassau County and northwestern Suffolk County. Meteorologist Lauren Nash told the Long Island Press it’s difficult to predict precisely how much of the white stuff the Island will see.

“The way that this low is positioned is really making it difficult [to predict] how much snow we’re going to get, how much ice we’re going to get,” she said. “That’s really the key to this forecast.”

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