Until last night, our computer models were in surprisingly good agreement about a sizeable swath of significant snow across the Midwest, with a large area picking up in excess of 6". Things are looking somewhat less snowy now, though. The disturbance that will be responsible for providing the next bout of snow is over land and has been sampled by the network of weather instruments. Since the computer models have additional real data to use, they're able to do a better job.
That's at least somewhat helpful, and our computer models are (at this time) still in decent agreement about the path of the low pressure. However, they differ on how quickly it will weaken as it traverses the Midwest. The NAM model keeps the low going long enough that heavier snow falls, while the GFS has it weakening 12-18 hours sooner, which would lead to fairly small snowfall amounts. Based on the information we have at this time, I'm going with a widespread 1-3" snowfall with 3-6" near and south of I-88. There is the possibility that this will need to be nudged northward a bit due to the snowmelt we had (see Eric's post about the "baroclinic zone" from a little while ago).
I've included in this post the HPC's preferred low track, as well as their snowfall probabilities.Of course, Adam will have more analysis this evening.
7 comments:
There's a much simpler way to forecast this:
Eric is on vacation.
Therefore, this will be a major, possibly even history-making beast of a storm.
Hmm... I hadn't considered that particular monkey wrench.
Once upon a time (2005 during spring break, as I recall), there was a plain ol' snowfall forecast for central Iowa... one of those 2-5" kind of things. Well, the system decided to go berserk and dumped some massive amounts of snow (15"+). It caught I think every single meteorologist there (media, NWS, etc.) off-guard because there were no signs it was going to do what it did.
Correction... it was in 2004. March 15, to be exact. Des Moines tallied 15.6" of snow.
I think sometimes winter storms are like hurricanes,they have minds of their own. Being a snow lover like me I hope this storm dumps a whole bunch.
Geez Justin... Eric goes on vacation and this is what you guys do to us?
Someone should do a "vacation storm summary" to see just exactly how many major storms we've received when Mr. Sorensen has "conveniently" been on vacation... However, that being said, I think it would certainly add to his credability as a meteorologist, being able to predict ahead of time the major events and "head for the hills"! :) Have fun and be safe, Eric!!
Oh and just to answer justins question on the headline, snow is the 6 sides white flake that falls from the clouds during the winter. I had to do that. I hope we get more than a couple inches.
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