Our First True Winter Storm?

Let’s get right to the point.  For a few days now, the weather modeling has been keying in on a low pressure system developing somewhere in eastern Texas tomorrow.  This storm would then deepen, or strengthen in lay terms, as it moves toward the Appalachian Mountains.  It’s starting to get close enough to game time now that I’m taking the models seriously.  Maybe this is for real.

As this storm gets stronger, it will be able to pull colder air in from the north, while spreading Gulf moisture up into Kentucky from the south.  This is THE classic setup for snow in the Ohio Valley and Appalachian region.  The question though, as always, is....   exactly what path will the low take?  Every 50 miles north or south makes a huge difference in what type of precipitation we will see.

Here is the CURRENT depiction from the GFS model, valid this morning.  As you can see, it is starting to change the rain over to snow for almost all of Kentucky by dawn on Sunday.  This chart is valid at 8:00 Sunday morning.  After seeing rain through the night, we’d see it start to come down as snow by the early daylight hours Sunday under this scenario.  Will this pan out as shown?  It’s still too early to tell.  Don’t get excited just yet.

The new 12:00 run of the GFS model will be available to look at in a couple of hours.  I am anxious to see where it takes the low pressure center.  If the low goes farther south, we get colder but see less snow.  If it goes farther north, we see more precip. but it’s too warm for snow.  We really need that perfect timing and perfect track to get a snowstorm here.  Stay tuned!

UPDATE:  The 12Z model data is in and it's very similar to the 06Z data.  The chart I posted above looks pretty much the same in the latest charts.  

The way I see this right now is as follows:  For Lexington and most of central Kentucky...  look for rain to move in late on Saturday.  This rain will increase in coverage and will become more steady after midnight and into Sunday morning.  Sometime around dawn on Sunday, the rain will gradually begin to change to snow.  The snow should end around noon on Sunday.

It stands to reason that we could see a light accumulation of snow on Sunday.  Right now I do not see this as being a catastrophic snowstorm for us.  However, the storm of February 1998 taught me that the process we call Dynamic Cooling can sometimes throw a wrench into the works.  A "dusting" was expected with that storm, which took on a VERY similar look to this upcoming storm..  but we woke to 8" in Bowling Green and almost 20" in central Kentucky.  So we will have to approach this forecast very carefully.  I'm going with 1-3" of snow right now.  But stay tuned......

-Shawn

Map courtesy of Weather Underground