We Have A Lot To Track

Good afternoon, everyone. It’s a windy start to the Thanksgiving travel period as showers and thunderstorms roll across the Commonwealth. We continue to watch for the potential for a few stronger thunderstorms through the evening. At the same time, we continue to focus on a winter storm system likely to impact our region from late weekend into early next week.

Like I said… We have a lot to track.

Let’s begin with what’s going on out there right now. Wind gusts of 40mph or greater continue to show up as our cold front sweeps from west to east. This front is also likely to have a line of showers and thunderstorms along and ahead of it. Some of these storms may be strong or locally severe. The Storm Prediction Center has much of the state in the low-end risk for severe weather…

Here are your rain and storm tracking tools…

Current watches

Possible Watch Areas

Clouds will be stubborn into Thanksgiving Day and Friday and I still can’t rule out some mist of a light shower. Thanksgiving Day temps range from the upper 40s to low 50s for many. We should bounce it up a few degrees on Friday ahead of a weak cold front. That knocks the numbers back down a bit for Saturday.

This is where the fun begins. We are going to see a bowling ball of energy rolling out of the southwestern part of the country at the same time energy dives in from the northwest. Those two are going to try to hook up for a phased storm system across the eastern half of the country. The exact details of this storm remain a mystery, but the potential is there for this to develop into a major winter storm for some areas of the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes and Appalachian Mountains.  Does that include where you live? That’s certainly possible, but I’m not ready to say it’s a certainty.

Confidence is increasing of some kind of winter weather impact for Kentucky, but I can’t tell you to what extent that will be. Very little impact to a major impact are both on the table, so please keep that in mind.

The EURO continues to be an absolute monster that would begin with the second letter of the alphabet…

Look at this textbook phasing in the upper levels…

The Canadian Model is right on top of the EURO…

Here’s the Canadian Model at the surface…

The GFS seems to be back to playing into its own bias of being too progressive. If we look a the upper levels, notice how it really doesn’t have any northern stream energy diving into the trough, but still manages to form a huge cutoff low…

The end result on the model is for a potent, but disjointed, winter storm system to our east. It has the upper low spinning over us producing snow and wind Monday through part of Wednesday…

The GFS Ensembles are more aligned with the EURO and Canadian than its own operational GFS. Here’s the upper level look…

The EURO Ensembles and the control run of the EURO Ensembles are all in…

This isn’t like looking at a potential storm from a week or 10 days out, this is now within a higher confidence range of 4 days out. I still expect some typical model changes and even a pure hiccup or two, but if we see the same trend going at this time tomorrow, then we will really jump all over this thing.

As it stands now, nothing is set in stone in terms of what kind of system we will see develop. I continue to feel confident about our first taste of winter weather out of this. Will it be something very minor or something that is memorable? I cannot answer that at the moment. Keep in mind, the above maps are computer forecast models and not a specific forecast from me.

I will have another update this evening and will have full updates on every WKYT-TV show I’m on this evening.

Make it a good one and take care.