Good afternoon, everyone. Let me begin by saying I have no substantial changes to my thoughts from the past few days. The Winter Storm THREAT continues for southern and southeastern Kentucky, as the models keep bouncing around. When that happens, I’ve found it’s best not to get caught up in knee jerk reactions and stay the course. That’s where I am, right now. Will that change later today? Maybe so.

The low is just now beginning to form, so it makes sense the models are still struggling with everything. Let this storm develop and then we will see what the late afternoon and evening models have to say about this thing.

Let’s star with the new version of the GFS. It jumped ship with the storm with the 6z run, but is back on board with the very next run this morning. It still targets the south and southeast…

Here’s where the snow and ice show up on that particular run…

The Hi Res NAM is targeting some of the same areas of the south and southeast…

The Canadian Model family had been a miss for Kentucky. The latest runs are now the farthest north and west of the bunch. Here’s the short range Canadian that only goes through daybreak Sunday…

That takes the snow and ice along and north of Interstate 64.

The regular version of the Canadian is similar…

The snow forecast from that model looks like what had been showing up on most models the past few days, with a sharp gradient between no snow and heavy snow…

The UKMET is actually pretty far north with the precipitation shield into Kentucky…

This brings us to the NAM and GFS. Both models only offer a glancing blow to the southeastern corner of the state…

NAM

GFS

Here’s what this boils down to…. It’s all about how strong the high pressure is across the Midwest and Ohio Valley. The stronger that high is, the better the chance it pushes much of this system to our south and southeast. The weaker that high, the better opportunity we have for this storm to move more to the north.

In looking at the temps across the region as of this writing, the NAM and GFS may be too strong with that high as the numbers are outpacing the model forecasts.

Let’s see what the afternoon and evening models have to say, then we can talk more. Until then, this ain’t my first rodeo in dealing with a setup like this. History tells me to stay the course.

I will have updates on WKYT-TV starting at 4pm and here on KWC later in the evening. Make it a great one and take care.