On the Snow Watch

Here we go again. Watching another potential winter storm. So far this season, this one looks to have the best chance of being a snow machine than any of the others.

We are still several days away from the storm dumping snow on southeast Missouri, southern Illinois, western Kentucky, northeast Arkansas, northwest Tennessee, and southern Indiana. The storm would start to affect the area starting Wednesday with clouds. Eventually, enough moisture will fall to saturate the column of air over the top of us and allow for the snow to make it to the ground. The heaviest snow would fall Thursday.

Want to have some fun? Lets take a look at some of the snowfall totals the computer models are hinting at. I have to stress, this is NOT my forecast. This is only the output from a computer model.

Cape Girardeau, Missouri:


Farmington, Missouri:


Paducah, Kentucky:


Each line represents a different run of the GFS computer model. We have to use the GFS for now as that is the only model, that I have access to, that puts out snowfall amounts that far in to the future.

The nice thing about this storm will be that we are talking all snow for everyone. It doesn't appear we will have to be dealing with our usual rain/snow line.

Lets now take a closer look at what the GFS is showing for Cape Girardeau.


If you are new to the blog, time runs from right to left on the above graphic. The red line is the surface temperature. The blue vertical bars indicate snow.

Notice the model tries to bring in snow late Wednesday night. I don't think we'll see snow that early due to the dry air in place (previously mentioned). However, the column should saturate pretty quickly.

Note: Don't take the times of too much to heart. As I said earlier, this is still 120 hours away. There will be a lot of rough and fine tuning by the model over the next couple of days.

The other thing I want to point out. Look at the cold air coming down! We will be tapping in to the core of the coldest air over Canada, the Polar Vortex.

Here is the European forecast agency's computer model look at the cold air coming down. This image is for 6pm CT Thursday.


If you watched Heartland News at 6pm and 10pm Saturday, you might have heard me talking about cold air for the end of the week. Thursday's high temperature will come early and then temperatures will plunge the rest of the day. I was calling for a high of 21° Friday, but as I said, temperatures could easily be much colder. If we have a decent snow pack on the ground, temperatures might struggle to get out of the lower teens. Stay tuned...

If this storm comes to truth, will this impact school? When do students go back to school?