Good Wednesday to one and all. Here we are in the middle of one of the coldest weeks in the past few winters and we have no snow on the ground. We’re tracking two systems that will try to change that over the next few days. The first system is rather weak and skirts the state later tonight. The second one comes Friday, but will the cold air suppress the storm into only a light snow maker? Some models think so… others do not.

System number one dives right on top of the state today. A streak of light snow will fall just to the north of this track. That means northern and eastern Kentucky will have the highest chance to pick up a light snowfall this evening and overnight. Temps today will stay in the 20s for many and you can track it all, here:

The air behind this clipper is very cold and will reinforce the arctic air we have in place. Highs Thursday will struggle into the low and middle 20s. This takes us to the storm system that will impact our weather on Friday.

Earlier in the week, the American models were taking this storm north into the Great Lakes. The GFS even had us near 50 degrees on Friday with showers and thunder. Storms don’t just cut into low level arctic air and we said that scenario would never happen and it won’t.

Those same American models are doing a 180 and now say the storm system stays weak and fairly far to our south. The overnight runs of the NAM and GFS were quite wimpy and only delivered a very light snowfall to central and eastern Kentucky Friday.

The rest of the models are much more optimistic. The Canadian Model…

Canadian

UKMETUKMET

GFS EnsemblesGFS

I just got a look at the new European Model and it seems to match the Canadian model pretty well. Both could get parts of the area into Threat mode.

All of those models show much more snow around here than what the GFS and NAM show. We’re still a few days away from this system and I worry about the American model head fake I talked about last night. Let’s see what trends we have on all the models today and tonight and go from there.

The long range sees the cold hang tough through the weekend before easing up a bit early next week. That will be a brief mild up and will come with rain. The next round of arctic cold moves in by the middle of next week and it’s likely to be colder than this latest blast…

GFS 2

Yes, I know… arctic cold without snow is a waste and I couldn’t agree more. You must have the cold to get snow… at least in theory. 😉

I will update as needed today. Have  wonderful Wednesday and take care.