Ice Storm?

Last week I mentioned a couple of systems that would move through this week, and we talked about how the Thursday system would be the interesting one.  Well, the GFS runs of the past two days have made that system look even more interesting.

Precip. is predicted to move in Thursday night and linger into Friday morning.  But what’s interesting is the temperature profile being shown for this system.  Check out where the freezing line sets up at the surface:

It looks like that along and north of I-64 in Kentucky we’ll see the mercury fall to or below freezing as this precip. in moving into the state.  So it’s going to snow, right?  Well, not really.  Look at the 850mb chart (approx. 5,000 ft. in the air) for the same time:

Now the freezing line is well to the north.  So you’ve got warmer air aloft keeping everything as plain rain…but it’s falling onto a surface that’s at or below freezing.  You know what that means, right?  I C E.

IF these GFS runs work out to be correct, the northern half of Kentucky could see a pretty serious ice event Thursday night and into Friday morning that would drastically impact travel.  We’re a few days out so we’ll just watch the model trends and see if this scenario keeps showing up in the modeling.

I will say that last week the local NWS office had to do a 180 flop with their forecast because they had been ignoring the GFS model which was the only one predicting the system that affected us mid-week.  When will people learn that you never completely count out the good ol’ GFS model?  Time will tell for this week…but it just might get interesting.

Shawn