Good Friday, folks. This is going to be a very busy day as I try to get a better handle on the developing winter storm slated to slam our region later tonight into Saturday. Snow, sleet, freezing rain and rain will all be likely throughout our region. All of this will be followed by ANOTHER round of bitter cold air.

We’re stating this day out with temperatures that are absolutely unreal. Many thermometers will shatter records for the day and could approach all time record cold readings. Rural temperatures will fall to between -20 and -30 degrees. I could see a few reports of lower than -30.

-37 degrees is the coldest temps on record for the state of Kentucky. That was in Shelbyville back in January of 1994. That’s from the same week I talked about this one trying to replicate. And… here we are with a VERY similar week.

That brings us to our next item up for bids… another winter storm. This system will bring snow, sleet, freezing rain and rain to the bluegrass state over the next 36 hours. Winter Storm Watches are out as of this writing and many of those will likely be upgraded at some point today.

Here’s what I think I know:

– This system is loaded with moisture, but isn’t a strong storm. Much of the moisture is overrunning and that usually spells trouble when you have arctic air and a snowpack in place.

– Whatever form of precipitation falls where you live… there will be a lot of it. You could get all forms of precipitation to mix it up a bit.

– I still don’t think the models are handling the thermal profile well and that many areas may wind up a touch colder than the models suggest. A deep snowpack and arctic air will have something to say about that.

– This has the potential to get downright ugly with the trio of sleet, freezing rain and snow. I just can’t pinpoint which type and where. I hope to do that with my next update.

Here’s where the NAM shows the greatest concentration of winter precipitation falling…

 

NAM

The GFS is much more choppy with it all, but the GFS hasn’t exactly been burning up the model world in the past week…

GFS

Don’t just look at those maps and think snow… think snow, sleet and freezing rain.

Look what follows all that up by Monday morning…

GFS TEMPS 1

Next week looks to be another brutally cold week! Watch a system trying to develop late week into next weekend.

Updates come later today and I will be tweeting out the latest model info and the latest on just how cold things wind up this morning. Help me out and tweet some pics of thermometers where you live or throw some numbers at me in the comments section.

Stay warm and take care.