Just for Fun - 18z Precipitation Totals

Finally getting a chance to look closer at the mid-afternoon's 18z or 12pm CT run of NOAA's global forecast model (GFS).

The mid-afternoon run appears to be keeping the storm north as it did with this morning's 12z or 6am CT run. This would mean that there would be more rain for places like St. Louis, Cape Girardeau, Carbondale, Indianapolis, and Columbus (Indiana). If this holds true, there could be a lot of rain for these locations. For example, in Cape Girardeau the model is pumping out over 2.5" of rain.

It appears that the snow band would be setup up across the northern parts of Illinois.

• Chicago: The model is putting down 8.5" of snow from Thursday afternoon through early Friday morning.
• Moline, Illinois: The model is putting down 10" of snow early Thursday morning through early Friday morning.

I generally am not a fan of the 6z (12am CT) and the 18z (12pm CT) run of the computer models. They don't include any upper-air data in the initialization. However, this is the only new data we get to look at until the 0z/12z (6pm CT/6am CT) runs get processed.

Again, keep in mind that these are just computer projections from one model and one run. These are not the actual forecast rain/snow amounts. I put these numbers on here just so you can see the information I am looking at. It could be a couple of days until we get a better handle on the situation.