Good evening, folks. Gusty winds and scattered showers are rolling across the state as we get ready to usher Old Man Winter back into town. The cold air coming this week is the opening act to a bigger system waiting on us for the coming weekend. Confidence continues to increase on a winter weather impact from that storm.

This is a massive update, so sit back and relax. šŸ™‚

The evening showers are out there, but the rain isn’t that much of an issue…

Cold air waits until Tuesday night to surge in here and really sets up shop for Wednesday and Thursday. Those two days are going to be quite the shock as highs stay below freezing, with 30mph wind gusts making it feel MUCH colder.

The northwest wind is usually good for some flurries or snow showers across central and eastern Kentucky. You can see some of those on the HI-Res Nam…

This brings us to the end of the week/weekend storm potential. Confidence isĀ high that winter weather will impact our region from late Friday through Sunday. The extent of that impact remains to be seen. Much of that depends on how much interaction we get between the northern branch and the southern branch. That will dictate where this storm goes and how strong it gets.

As I have mentioned many times, this is a different setup from the storm systems of the past 3-4 weeks. We have cold air already in place and a cold high to the north of it.

The GFS rolls this thing from west to east across the south, with an inverted trough into our region…

The new version of the GFS is far and away the farthest north solution, but doesn’t have very many model friends to play with. Still, the model puts down quite a bit of winter weather…

The majority of theĀ individual members of the GFS Ensembles are ere a healthy hit for the bluegrass state…

Here’s the average of those 21 members…

The European Model continues to struggle with the southwestern energy and is likely too slow with it, keeping the storm system too weak. The Euro actually has two lows…

That leads to much more of a disjointed looking snow shield…Ā 

The JMA has a southern low working west to east with an inverted trough into our region, then it turns the corner up the coast…

The colors are barometric pressure anomalies and not temperatures. Notice the big high pressure funneling cold air into this storm from the north. That’s something we did not have with the past several systems.

I said over the weekend that it won’t be until later Tuesday or Wednesday that we get this thing into better focus on the models. I still believe that to be true. Still, the signal is there for winter weather, potentially significant, this weekend for much of our region. Will this become a “threat” storm? Very possible.

I’ll see you guys later tonight for the full update. Until then, make it a good one and take care.