Chris's Corner - Happy Holidays and Here Comes a Storm!

This light freezing drizzle/sleet is going to make the roads brutal.

Steady light freezing rain. Everything in our subdivision is a sheet of ice. Temp: 28

4" in St. Peter's?


I'm not trying to be critical but that just doesn't add up with everything else around the area

We have 1.5" in Belleville but it's melting a bit.

Freezing mist is impacting the roads here, multiple accidents being reported around the area

Drop the warning and chalk it up as a loss.

I saw sev rpts of 4 on dave murrays fb from ofallon and st peters. I assume though since its a public rpt that it was an eyeball rpt. I think 3 is reasonable. Im very close to 3.

lol

Steady frz drizzle in Perryville. Nice glaze developing on vehicles and elevated surfaces. We must be just a hair below freezing. Another degree or two drop tonight and it’ll get real dicey.

At least you had some snow lol..... It literally snowed here for maybe 15 minutes at a decent clip.....joking aside we are getting some light freezing rain though now

Showtime-marissa, you must get our weather from Festus? It sounds like your weather today was the same as ours!

Measured 3.5" about half hour ago. Seems it is either melting or compacting. Accumulation is hard to come by with this event. High here today was 26. Currently 24

Another channel just mentioned the possibility of heavier snowSTL and points southeast tomorrow. Is that what the RAP is hinting at?

2.3" in Harvester

I have a completely opposite opinion of the model performance in the last 48 hours. As overall guidance goes...they did an excellent job across the board guiding us to a plausable solution. They depicted mesoscale banding which a few years ago would have been unheard of. They placed those bands within tens of miles of where they would form. They depicted quite accurately the razor thin margin for error on the south end of the precip. All of this gave meteorologists a lot to work with when in terms of GUIDANCE...so that we could do the human part...and come up with a pretty accurate and representative forecast. In short, they did their job! Did they waffle too much to the south 24 hours before the storm??? Sure.. they waffle all the time. But they were trying resolve a mesoscale band the width of STL county. The fact it was depicted at all...with such a strong signal...is pretty stellar. I drove through the 2nd band...and that was some of the most intense snow I have seen since March 2008.

I think we sometimes need to do a gut check and remember these models are not perfect. If they were you wouldn't need meteorologists. The skill of the meteorologists is tonwade through the waffling models and see the big picture through some of the noise. The best forecasts are not knee jerk reactions to every model twist and turn. The best forecasts come from science, experience and understanding model gudiance and its limitations...its common errors, etc.

I know some folks think anything but a perfect model forecast is a complete failure. I think the failure comes from not recognizing what the models can and cannot do... and placing too lofty an expectation on them.

On to phase 2.