Then things change.
And, go figure, the change isn't an easy one to pin down. The midweek system will take a west-east path similar to last nights. However, it looks to farther north with a lot more "oomph" to it. With a more northerly track, it will pull in warm air. Temperatures warm enough, in fact, for there to be at least a rain/snow mix, if not all rain, for part of this event. Then, as the low pulls away, cold air filters back in, changing precipitation back over to all snow, along with breezy conditions.
The big challenges at this point are 1) where the low will track, 2) how much warm air will be pulled northward, and 3) how quickly or slowly will cold air change the precip to snow.
Here are the last four runs of the GFS computer model, valid at 6pm Wednesday. The "L" in the Midwest depicts the position of the low at that time, and the green and blue swaths indicate precipitation totals from noon until 6pm Wednesday. Anything within the blue dashes, in general, is snow; anything that's past that last blue dash, especially in red dashes, is rain. You can see that there are some big variations from run to run.
Right now, I can't buy into a scenario in which we get a large amount of snow. The possibility exists for that to happen, but since it really looks as though we'll have rain for at least part of this event, that will cut heavily into accumulations. As always, we'll have updates on this.
On a different note, one of my colleagues and mentors, Erik Maitland, will be the focus of the first part of Dateline NBC at 6pm tomorrow (Sunday) on WREX. He was a meteorologist at KWQC a few years back when he was doing the weather live at a fair when breaking news happened right behind him... to see the full story, you'll just have to watch the show.
3 comments:
Actually justin when I enlarged those model runs, it looks like all of them have us as snow and not much rain. Unless I am not looking close enough.
Gotcha - I've edited the post with a little clarification.
Justin, you and adam have done an absolute superb job as usual with these forecasts while mr sorenson has been in rain soaked new orleans. Just think now of the headache he will have trying to predict this storm when he returns on tuesday. I hope we do more snow than rain out of this. I imagine snow lovers would want that. Keep up the great work. 13 weather authority rocks.
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