Good Sunday, folks. December begins with milder air pushing into the region and that’s a trend that takes us into the middle of the upcoming week. This is a mild up that will be on the dirty side with clouds and showers. Those type of mild ups usually don’t last very long and neither will this one. By the end of the week, arctic air and frozen precipitation will try to take center stage.
Clouds will thicken today as a light shower or two tries to break out. These showers will increase into Monday and Tuesday as temps come back down a few degrees.
This happens as a MASSIVE arctic outbreak takes place across the plains and the western part of the country. One area of low pressure will develop in the Rockies and head toward the western Great Lakes by Wednesday. That drags a cold front into the region…
Arctic air is dense and very heavy and the models tend to underestimate how fast it can move. We are seeing the models speeding up the arrival of the cold into our region. Many now show this impacting us by Thursday. This is where things try to get interesting. I expect the arctic front to slowly sag across the state and stall out just to our south by the end of the week. Waves of low pressure will develop along this boundary…
The temperature gradient along this front is going to be astounding. It will have -20 air behind it in the plains states and 70s ahead of it in the far southeastern part of the country. That’s a recipe to get a lot of precipitation to develop with these waves of low pressure. Overrunning moisture will filter north of the front and into the cold air. That may produce some nasty wintry weather from Texas through our region and into the Mid Atlantic states.
The GFS was the first to really start to sniff out the colder, faster scenario. You can also see the wave train developing..
Remember… this will be low-level arctic cold air that penetrates farther south and east than you will see with a lot of the model maps.
Have a great Sunday and take care.
Great a 32.00001 degree rain. Followed by a dusting.
If its rain it will be freezing rain then you wouldn’t care about the dusting
Probably not, since the surface area should be warm enough at that point to not allow accumulation. We are going to have fifty degree temps before it. The previous ice events had colder air precede them and the warm air aloft dropped the precip is rain onto the cold surface below.
That said, if ever mets call for ice events, they have about a 90% accuracy rate compared to 10% with snow. The models Love them some ice.
Wintry mess is dangerously close to ice imo
Yep, but the good news would be no frozen ground and surface level to quickly accumulate with 🙂
Anyways Mix = Most of Kentucky
I dont like his ice/snow tweet and it doesnt take a whole lot of snow and the geound wasnt frozen when we had this last skiff of snow
Thanks for the look ahead, Chris. My son has a soccer tournament here in Lex next weekend. Brrrr!
Cold rain again, nothing to see here and nothing to
Get excited about. Winters here stink
Future snow, please follow the example from this overachieving, warmer air we have in place right now. WKYT forecast high was 47 yesterday, actual high in Madison 54 (and many places in the 50-55 range). Forecast high today is 48 and it’s already 45 at 9 AM, so we look to see the same result again today.
No need to wait until mid-week for a “mild up”, it started yesterday (Twitter)
That happened most of last year. The warm air was under appreciated in most forecasts and outlooks. Net result was what we got last year…and the year before that etc.
This year seems to have a great shot at colder air, but cold air and moisture are like oil and water in this region. We could get the cold air and still not get much snow. We be the transition zone for winter events.
Ky xmas song. Let it Rain, Let it Rain,Let it Rain.
BubbaG, reason I asked the other day….. “Write this down….. The is coming winter is going to be bad. Not saying snowy, but cold-bad. Not even I am pompous enough to suggest snow.” April 24. I literally marked your words, winter season just started, let’s see how your words stand by it.
the 2003 awful ice storm wasn’t bad when it came to freezing rain on the actual roads…it wasn’t cold enough because temps before it were in the 50s I believe and it rained a lot before it changed to frz rain…..it was on everything else though. Driving wasn’t a problem in terms of frozen roads, it was the fact that everything was down all over the place blocking everything. I hate thinking about ever going through something like that again……
That second wave modeled for sunday on the latest GFS run looks like it could be ice for a little while before turning back to rain…Surface temps should be around 32 degrees or a little colder before slowly warming..This is for parts of eastern ky…
Don’t take this map too seriously since it days away, but still fun to look at :).
Joe Bastardi posted a pic of snow totals 10 days from now..
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/BaZ9D3gCIAAwupJ.jpg:large
Wow……….
Yea……….dreamland…..
Yeah, that would be like the best map ever IMBY!
Euro showing single digits for our area and below zero north of river! If it gets that cold, road temps will definitely go below freezing when the next system comes in a form of snow and ice! VERY scary/interesting setups are showing next couple of weeks. So let’s soak up these mild temps as it looks like it may not get this mild again for rest of winter (possibly.)
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that much of our region and KY will get some significant winter weather over the next 2-3 weeks. But enjoy it as I expect January and February to bring warmer weather.
Are these models shown and referred to, any more credible than any other model that predicts snow and other winter precipitation several days out? Help me here: Which model is best at predicting, or not snow more than 3 days out?
Is it safe or fare to say that our winter box is full of poor tools which effect the product we build?