Winter Storm Watches have been replaced by Winter Storm WARNINGS and Advisories for parts of southeast Missouri, southern Illinois, western Kentucky, northwest Tennessee, and northeast Arkansas. The warnings and advisories generally go in to effect Thursday night and continue through Friday night.
I have been having a hard time getting in phase or in sync with this storm. Usually I don't have a problem getting in phase with winter storms because I am able to dive in to all of the data run to run, but having been out of town on a business trip has made it a little more tricky.
All along I have been thinking that the heaviest band of snow could setup along a line from roughly Poplar Bluff, Missouri to Paducah. I am thinking the heavy snow band will develop slightly south of that line. As is usually the case, everything depends on the track of the storm.
How much snow we get will also be highly dependent on the amount of moisture. There is still not a lot of agreement between the models as to how much moisture there will be. The other thing to watch will be storm development south along the gulf coast. In the past I have seen storms develop along the gulf coast and rob the moisture. That doesn't appear to be the case this time, but it is something to watch.
At this point, I do not feel comfortable giving a snow forecast yet and to be honest I don't know if I will be able to give one of my "John Dissauer snowfall forecasts" like I have done in the past. I usually only give those when I feel very comfortable and feel like I have a good grasp of this storm. That being said, I will still be giving out information and guesstimates.
As I am still formulating what I will be going with, here is a couple of different looks for data across the area. Before everyone starts to ask "What about Illinois? What about the bootheel?", I don't make the following graphics myself. The graphics are generated from data points provided by NOAA and they set the data points. There aren't any data points for the data that generates these graphics in southern Illinois and the Missouri bootheel. And the following is NOT the forecast. The data is simply that. Just data output from the computer models.
Each line represents a different model run. There are two different models represented, the GFS and the NAM. The fifth line is the forecast from the National Weather Service.
Cape Girardeau, Missouri:
Farmington, Missouri:
Paducah, Kentucky:
Jonesboro, Arkansas:
For locations not shown above, you can extrapolate the amounts from above and get an estimate of where you could fall.
As you can see from the data, each model seems to be very consistent with itself, but the models aren't consistent with each other. That is what makes this forecast difficult.
How much snow do you think we will get?
This is just talking about snow. There will be some significant icing south of the Missouri bootheel. In fact, I have this weird suspicion that the freezing rain could drift a little further north. That being said, we are still NOT looking at an ice storm like last year.
Here is a "human reviewed" look from the HPC. This graphic shows you probabilities of different types of winter weather for Friday. Remember, this is showing probabilities not whether or not you are getting snow, ice, etc.
1 comment:
do you think it is possible the cape county could get more than 4in or do you think 4in the max.
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