Ice Storm

Good afternoon.  Snow showers continue across central Kentucky this afternoon in the wake of a large low pressure system that moved through last night.  Visible satellite imagery as of 13:30 shows that western KY is starting to see the snow end and the clouds breaking up.  The rest of Kentucky east of the Green River Parkway is still socked in with clouds and snow showers and this will likely be the rule today.

Our next weather system comes in the form of an Alberta Clipper that will sweep in from the northwest on Saturday evening.  This system will be a quick hitter and should move out of the area by noon on Sunday.  In it's wake, another inch of snowfall is possible.  This won't be a deep snow producer either, but it could cause slick roadways.  A few church cancellations are possible Sunday.

Beyond that, we've got a big storm moving in late Monday and it should be a heavy rain producer for us on Tuesday as well.  Everybody looks to get a soaking rain from this. 

Then we turn our eyes to next weekend.  The last two runs of the GFS model have been keying in on a possible over-running situation setting up near Kentucky late next week.  Over-running systems cause warm air to ride up and overtop of cold surface air.  This usually leads to icing problems for us.  Check out today's 12Z GFS charts:

That chart is the 850mb chart, which shows temperatures at about 5,000 ft. above the ground.  Notice that the freezing line runs just south of Indianapolis and then into southern Ohio.  Notice also that precipitation (the green shading) is starting to pic up across all of Kentucky during this time.  NOW..  look at this chart:

That is the 2M chart, which shows temperatures at the surface where we live.  See where the freezing line is setting up on this chart?  Yup.. it's draped right along the I-64 corridor and it bisects the state of Kentucky.

So what you would have in this scenario is precipitation falling through an above-freezing airmass...and then striking a below-freezing surface.  This is a textbook recipe for an ICE STORM that would affect all of Kentucky along and north of I-64.

This is 6 or 7 days out... and the overall pattern will change some between now and then as the details get tweaked.  I am not saying that we are definitely going to see an ice storm here.  I'm simply showing you this to point out that some very interesting weather could be coming down the road.  Get ready.. Winter is just getting started.


-Shawn