Chris's Corner - Bitter Cold and Some Snow

Well Ukie throws us a bone with a nice wet snow Sunday night. Several inches.

All right!! Ty, Some good news..maybe the reverse psychology is working..lol 😉🤞

El Nino favors south. And even a further north trend would lack cold air. I will have trouble getting too excited about any meaningful snow with forecast temps that remain above freezing.

HRRR is setup and ready go for the eclipse on April 8th. Totality occurs close to 19Z (2pm) so we should get more realistic cloud information including any modulation caused by the eclipse itself by the 0Z (7pm) run on April 6th.

gsl.noaa.gov/news-media/news/2023-annular-eclipse

Models are trending towards a stronger push with the N stream now but there's still no cold air...I don't have much interest in this one unless the Ukie is onto something.

The Icon has a light slushfest... but so far everything that is further north has nowhere near enough cold air to get me interested. As a matter of responsibility, I am (of course) going to keep a close watch on the trends. However, as a matter of public forecasting, I'm not going to get a lot of hopes up with by mentioning snow on the air.

6z EPS continues the climb north.

It now has a distinct camp on the northwest side of the envelope and one on the southeast side.

Can ignore the mean given the bimodal distribution.

I understand your point, but there is nuance here.

I think the models did incredible with our near miss before the arctic hammer came down. They had the general idea picked out nearly 300 hours out. Sure, the fine details bit us, but they nailed the conceptual framework.

This storm, the differences regionally are as big as the Grand Canyon.

This one is sounding better..even if the gap is the Grand Canyon..you like our chance in se metro wsc?

Wow..alright just have to stay tuned I guess. BTW Cohen was just on a network talking about the next few weeks..will see..

Some serious concrete on the 12z gfs. Probably some tree damage for the metro that run.

12z ggem is north too and has a decent snow for the area.

In fact, GGEM is close to a very nice winter storm.

Huge reversal in all models so far.

Yes, I went from missing south to now rain..and Snow north of me...it will be an interesting watch..seems the models "might" be settling into a 🏕 or they maybe transient by 18z...will see.

The set-up still looks somewhat like last January's slush fest...although the location may end up being a little different in the end. We'll see.

It's just hard to get too excited about these very marginal temperatures at the surface... and a set-up that doesn't have the advantage of dry air advection and evaporative cooling to help us out much... if at all. The system will have to work hard to generate enough lift and high precipitation rates to overcome the very marginal temperatures. The surface system looks weak. The mid-level system is shearing out. So we are left with jet dynamics and possible mesoscale banding along the mid-level front as our most likely contributors to lift. Time of day will assist in the cool down and possible accumulations... but it will have to snow big flakes and hard in order to overcome the warm ground. Temperatures would be in the mid-30s with snow...and only drop close to freezing in the brief period of "heaviest" snow.

The fact that the timing is going into the morning drive Monday does elevate the potential for at least some impacts. It just looks like a snow that melts almost as fast as it falls... a sloppy, slushy mess. Unfortunately, just because it doesn't have that "exciting" look to me doesn't mean it might not have some impacts. So we will need to start adding a mention of something in the forecast for Monday morning going forward.

I’m just counting down the days until spring at this point

It’s becoming a fools errand to track winter weather around here anymore