Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Could This Be The Big One?

We have been waiting all winter for a big snow event to hit Kokomo but we have been missed by a few miles to a few hundred.  This one could be our big event.  Let me show you why but first lets get a few preliminary things out of the way first.

Today we topped out at 34.5 degrees and spent nearly four hours above the freezing.  A little bit of the snow pack melted.  It was most noticeable in the open areas where the wind had blown the snow away.  I noticed several brown grassy spots.

There will be two waves of snow.  The first snow will be Friday night into Saturday lingering into Sunday.  Accumulation will be 1 to 2 inches and normally, I would spend more time on this.  However there are much bigger fish to fry with this blog post.

There have been some clues that a big storm was in the works. Some of the TV meteorologists had been mentioning the system before today but this afternoon was different.  The normally conservative National Weather Service in Indianapolis lead their afternoon forecast discussion with the following headline...


BIG SNOWSTORM POTENTIAL SUNDAY INTO TUESDAY.

They have a pretty high confidence level for the system to bring big snow but they are a little unsure of the heaviest snow path.  The forecast models will move around the track of the system and will likely increase and decrease the snow amounts too.

With that said, let's look at 12z model.  It shows a pretty good hit with no problems.





The 18z model also looks good but for the overall total but there could be some mixing with freezing rain.


 
 

The rain/snow line is rather close and could cause some issues.  You can see both the JMA and GFS while orient the line differently, they both show the potential problem.



You can see the 18z temperature graph shows how close with flirt with freezing.

 

Either way, the system is juicy.



I do look how this looks like a bowling ball type of hit across the Ohio Valley.  The last system similar to this was the Valentine's Day system on 2007.  We had more then 12 inches with that storm.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

say for fun this pans out( which scarily, the models agree somewhaat) what would this do to the winter grade?

Jim said...

If more than 10 inches, I likely could see an A. :)

Anonymous said...

should be no problem with the amount of qpf projected it its all snow. NWS is using 70 and north for the heavy stuff, lets hope it stays there:)

Anonymous said...

Longer range is showing a trend of warmer weather and negatively titled troughs.

Could this be the early sign of the tornado season?