Good Friday, everyone. Our second winter storm in 5 days is rolling into Kentucky today, bringing several inches of snow. This system is part of a very harsh winter pattern that’s locked into our region for the foreseeable future.
A Winter Storm Warning is out for much of Kentucky and surrounding states. This map shows the current warnings and advisories and will update through the day…
The snow arrives from southwest to northeast through the day. This rough outline times the first flakes into where you live…
In terms of snowfall, this continues to be a general 3″-6″ snowfall through Saturday. The ceiling is a little higher for snows across the Tennessee border counties and a few counties that border Virginia. Given they have deeper moisture, they have the potential to hit 4″-8″…
If we go full on Vegas on this, we will set the over/under on snowfall at around 4″ for any one location. Some will take the over and some will take the under. Either way, we are all snow winners today! ha
This is NOT going to be nearly as potent as the storm we just had. It doesn’t have the moisture nor the ice component, but it will certainly be impactful for travelers.
Snow showers continue into Saturday across central and eastern Kentucky as temps stay in the 20s.
A series of arctic cold fronts then sweep through here starting Sunday night and Monday and going through much of next week. Each of these can deliver light accumulations as they push through…
Bitterly cold temps slam in here behind these fronts with the potential for lows to reach 0 or below at times…
Wind chills are also going to be a big-time player as they may go well below 0. This wind chill animation from the GFS starts Monday evening and goes through Thursday morning…
The pattern should relax some late next week into the weekend before we go right back into another harsh pattern for the week of the 20th. This may feature a winter storm threat and more in the way of bitterly cold air…
I will have your typical updates. Until then, I have your tracking tools including our Kentucky Weather Cams to watch the flakes flying across different parts of the state…
Have a great day and take care.
No, we are NOT all winners.
The Climate Prediction Center has released their ENSO update for January, and it confirmed that we are in a La Nina condition, which has a 59% likelihood of persisting until April, when we should phase into ENSO Neutral. This hasn’t been a typical La Nina winter, primarily because the Polar Vortex decided that now was a good time to pay us a visit.
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.shtml
That’s why we need to REMEMBER this when in the summer people start talking about phases… because apparently it does NOT matter… It’s gonna do what it’s gonna do…
Anyway – Chris mentioned something… I forget where I read his post…here or X… but he mentioned how we should all be under a WSW since the criteria for all counties in KY is > 4 inches of snow…. I’m like ” what? That hasn’t always been the case?” Some counties had different criteria than others?