Good afternoon, folks. Heavy rain continues to impact areas of southern and southeastern Kentucky with more rain on the way. This soggy setup leads us into a much colder and wintry pattern later next week into the week leading up to Christmas.
Southern Kentucky has picked up a lot of rain already this week. Check out the Kentucky Mesonet 48 hour rain totals through noon today…
With two more systems on the way through Saturday, another 1″-3″ of rain will be likely across some of the same areas…
Here are your radars to follow the action that’s out there this afternoon…
The weekend system continues to show up better as we get closer and that’s something the Canadian has been saying from day one…
The GFS is showing some consistency on this now…
The trend with this new version of the GFS is that it can’t find something fully until its within 3 days away. That’s a REALLY bad thing for a model designed to be a medium range model that goes out to 16 days.
The big system moving in for Tuesday and Wednesday of next week is the one that unlocks winter…
I will update that part of the pattern with the evening update.
I’ll see you guys then. Have a good one and take care.
My weather station picked up 0.63″ of rain overnight and the low temperature never dipped below 60°. The stationary front is right over South Central Kentucky, but most of the precipitation is South of the border.
Next week’s forecasted blast of cold has all the symptoms of a “stretched” Polar Vortex, which differs from a standard PV in that it does not rely on stratospheric warming. That much cold air will probably push the storm track even further south, lowering our snow chances
I find that it’s useless to put much faith in the GFS beyond 48 to 60 hours out. Prior to that, it seems like every run picks up a new scenario, with variations that are anything but subtle. It’s not unusual to see a storm system appear in one run, disappear in the next, and then reappear in the run after that. My feeling is the that in the long term, the algorithms have a hard time handling data that does not conform to seasonal norms, which makes sense since we haven’t experienced normal around here in quite a while.
I run the automatic ( ICON ) on the Ventusky weather site. It’s been very accurate in predicting precipitation and temperatures in the 14 day outlook. I hope the AO stays negative and strong so that Arctic Air won’t stretch this far south. It doesn’t need to be that cold to have a Snowstorm. What’s keeping the Snows away is that strong ” Southeast Ridge ” hanging up the cold fronts.
When we phase from La Nina to ENSO- neutral / weak El Nino we may return to our climate to the ones we remember way back when. Better yet is the PDO going positive with a negative NAO plus a weak El Nino in place in the Tropical Pacific. Then the Snows will fly.
Polar Vortex guru Judah Cohen has published his most recent updated blog, where he discusses the PV and the upcoming pattern change. I asked Judah in a tweet earlier today how the continuing La Niña would affect the Polar Vortex this Winter, and said that La Niña favors a stronger Polar Vortex. This could be very meaningful as we progress into Winter.
Here is the blog:
https://www.aer.com/science-research/climate-weather/arctic-oscillation/
Thanks Joe for sharing this most interesting article.
I want a big snow but will take what I can get. The system next week is looking interesting. Could it be a milk and bread run lol??? I would say eggs to but they are too expensive lol.