Good evening, everyone. Our southern storm system is spreading rain into parts of southern and southeastern Kentucky while the rest of the region deals with dry weather. The mild weather looks to continue through Christmas week before changes show up by the final weekend of the year and into the start of 2020.
Let’s begin with today’s setup and roll ahead. My focus on the southern system is paying off as it is indeed bringing rain far enough north to impact parts of the bluegrass state. Our far southern and southeastern counties are the ones seeing rain moving in tonight…
Let’s review, up until a few days ago, absolutely zero models had any rain even close to Kentucky and several of them still have no rain into the bluegrass state. The model forecasts of a bowling ball system in the Gulf then turning southeast into the deep Caribbean were suspicious from the get go and you’re now seeing why. Buying models at face value and regurgitating that as a forecast is, unfortunately, where we are in today’s weather world.
Speaking of, every single model has a much different take on the trough ejecting out of the west and southwest next weekend. This plays right into the biases of the GFS and, especially, the EURO. The GFS will send this out too fast and jump on a northern system. The EURO will hold the energy back because that’s a major flaw of the model.
The Canadian Model represents a compromise between the two from next weekend into the final few days of the year…
I have no idea how exactly all that plays out because it’s a complicated scenario, but it represents a big change from the current setup.
Another illustration of the change comes via the GFS Ensembles snowfall forecast. The new run shows this through next Sunday…
If we add in the following 7 days, we continue to see a big southward advancement of the snow potential…
That has flake potential to near the Gulf Coast, so it’s seeing some pretty good cold shots across the country.
Have a happy rest of your Sunday and take care.
Radar has been showing rain in Middlesboro here along the Tennessee border for most of the afternoon and evening but nothing more than a few sprinkles thus far. I don’t expect we will see much rain from this
I guess two weeks from now we can discuss if the ensembles were correct or not. Let’s not forget, the ensembles were showing some pretty major troughs / cold air overtaking the central and eastern US for the first half of December. We see how that turned out with most everyone south of the northern states experiencing above normal temperatures on average for the first half of the month. The ensembles are generally about as reliable as the main individual runs of each model, with the GFS ensembles probably being the worst of them all. With that said, I hope two weeks from now we are digging out from a major snow while entrenched in arctic air.
Annnnd there it is hahahahaha
Jet stream….I wish that was still a vocabulary word that is used to describe snow or not! It just seemed easy and some what accurate.
Hyperbole as usual!
Our climate in the Ohio Valley does appear to have warmed or changed in some way. I remember years ago there would be several NFL games especially in December that had snow/ice/cold in places like Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Not so much anymore. Most times now you can’t tell the difference between December and October.
still not even a drop of rain in my part of SE KY