The “9 inches or more” from the Buffalo National Weather Service is a good starting point, but I will get into a little more detail (risky though that may be) later in the article.

First, we’ll be dealing with worsening cold and wind chill  later Friday into Saturday morning. The only glimmer of good news in this timing is the very worst of the wind chill will have passed before game time Saturday evening. A fairly brisk north-northeast breeze will develop by Friday afternoon, as temperatures tumble into the upper teens later in the day.

This flow may deliver some light lake-effect snow across parts of the Niagara Frontier and Chautauqua County shoreline, although models are not picking up on this. As for wind chill, I’m forecasting a northeast breeze at 12-18 mph by late Friday into early Saturday. Temperatures will fall to the low single digits overnight. If you use the NWS wind chill calculator, you can see a 5-degree reading combined with a 15-mph breeze results in a minus-13 degree wind chill.

A 7 a.m. Saturday morning low with a 13-mph breeze gives a wind chill value of minus-16 degrees. Why anyone would tailgate at 7 a.m. for an evening game in those conditions is a topic better suited for a psychologist, so I’ll leave that alone.

Saturday will be, as long advertised, a very cold day followed by a very cold night. There may be some lake flurries in the air from time to time, but mostly to the north of the stadium. Some limited sunshine may boost high temps to 10-13, before readings head back to around 5-7 degrees during the game under partly clear skies. The light northeast breeze will diminish to 7-11 mph by late afternoon and to 5-8 mph during the game. This will bring wind chill values into the minus-single-digit range. So, no, this will not be the coldest Bills game ever, but conditions will pose a threat to those who don’t take prudent precautions.

And I’ll repeat what some readers may regard as a fuddy-duddy link.

The Sunday daytime hours will provide a welcome buffer between the frigid conditions and an approaching winter storm that is expected to arrive Sunday night. Abundant sunshine and a light southeast breeze will boost afternoon highs to the mid- to upper 20s, courtesy of a huge ridge of departing arctic high pressure. Note the predicted position of the deepening storm at 7 a.m. is still in the

Deep South.

By Monday morning, the NWS Weather Prediction Center places the deep low center west of Philadelphia, on a somewhat unusual inland (rather than coastal) track. This increases the likelihood of a substantial and widespread heavy snow in our region, since nor’easters, on the coast, are usually too far east to put a hit on Western New York.

This projection for the inland track is a result of global models having come into better agreement on storm track. The storm itself is not in doubt. The track it follows is where the greater uncertainty was to be found. Let’s look at some specific models. First, there is the American GFS, which brings moderate and then heavy snow into Western New York from the south between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. The GFS is farthest east with the storm track.

The heavy snow would gradually decrease in intensity by late morning and early afternoon. Northeast winds will increase from 10-20 to 15-25 with stronger gusts out of the north during Monday.

The European/ECMWF takes a more inland track, which would likely bring somewhat heavier totals a little farther west. Its timing is one to two hours faster than the GFS. This is a 4 a.m. Monday coverage and position projection.

Winds become increasingly gusty during Monday, producing lots of blowing and drifting, but remaining below blizzard criteria.

Finally there is the Canadian GEM, showing a very strong impact in Western New York at 7 a.m. Monday.

On a Friday, I hesitate to get into model accumulation projections because they will change in future runs Friday night and into the weekend. Because of that, I will update this forecast in detail later Saturday morning in the comments section beneath the article. But as of now, these are the modeled accumulations I currently believe represent the most reasonable numbers, from the GEM.

That would be an approximate range of 15 to a few pockets of 20 inches by late Monday. As high as this range is, the ECMWF is somewhat higher. The GFS is displaced 10-20 miles farther to the east, reducing totals in Niagara County and the Lake Erie shoreline a few inches.

Before anyone jumps to the conclusion this is getting close to being a lock on accumulations, there are these caveats. Another good model, the UKMET from the British Met Office, is an outlier to the east, which would dramatically lessen totals in our region.

Finally, there are the ensemble means, based on many multiple runs of each model, each with slightly different initial conditions (because we can never know the precise initial conditions). These ensembles still keep the mean position of the storm significantly farther east than the operational models I’ve shown you, which would lessen impacts here.

Still, now that we’re closer to the event, most meteorologists are starting to lend more credence to actual models than ensemble means. The bottom line is the likelihood of a widespread major winter storm in our region continues to grow.