Good Wednesday everyone. We are at the middle of the first week of the new year and the weather community across the country is buzzing about the harsh winter pattern ahead. This is going to be a coast to coast old man winter smackdown and that pattern gets started later this week.

The heart of the wicked weather won’t fully kick in until the middle part of the month. In the meantime… the weather won’t be a walk in the park as we have several snow chances over the next week and change.

The first such chance will come today into early tonight across far southern Kentucky. The moisture field is only going to be able to make it so far north meaning those counties along the Tennessee border stand the best chance of seeing light snow late today. The system looks to be about 50 to 75 miles farther south than what I was thinking yesterday and that’s gives northern Tennessee the best threat to put a few inches of snow on the ground. Still… those counties in the south have a shot at a very light snowfall out of this.

Our attention will quickly turn to an arctic boundary dropping in here Thursday night and Friday morning. This will have several impulses riding southeastward into the region and each of these will produce periods of light accumulating snows. This is a huge cutoff low pressure that will take up residence near the Great Lakes from late Thursday through Saturday with these little systems pinwheeling around the low. This is kind of like spokes going around a bicycle wheel…



Timing these “spokes” of energy through the region is tough to do. The first should come through late Thursday evening with another by Friday morning then one more Friday night into early Saturday. This has the classic look of a general 1″-3″ of total snow for many in central and eastern Ky… with more than that across the higher elevations. Lighter amounts will show up across the western part of the state.

Temps will turn much colder as we get a taste of the arctic for the weekend. Highs Friday and Saturday should generally run in the low to mid 20s with lows dipping into the teens. Winds will make it feel even colder.

This leads us to early next week and the potential for a storm to come rolling out of the southern plains and into the eastern part of the country. The models are literally all over the place with how to handle the energy coming out of the western part of the country. Combine that with the fact the models have yet to fully grasp the depth of the big closed low in the lakes and northeast this weekend… and you can get some wild run to run model swings. We have certainly seen that over the past day or so as some models took the storm to our west with one run and then off the Georgia coast with the next run.

We will give them a few days to work things out before putting too much stock into any solution for this early week storm. That said… we might as well show you the current model run with the best threat of giving you snow. That is what you guys want… right?

Canadian Model


How about all that arctic cold that will be invading the states later this month? It is all systems go for the middle and end of the month for this pattern to produce some extreme temps across much of the country. To illustrate that point… we will once again use the GFS model temps forecast…



Don’t get caught up in the exact temps and the exact dates as we are only showing those maps to make a point of what the upcoming pattern is capable of producing in the extreme case.

I will have more updates coming later today and will get some radars up for our southern Kentucky friends who are on “volunteer” flake watch.

Have a great Wednesday and take care.