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January 31-February 2 Major Winter Storm part 3


Hoosier

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12z NAM is still pretty good for the southeast half of Iowa, but it has certainly been nudged a little to the east. Iowans need the surface low to track no farther southeast than southeast Missouri so any further eastward shift needs to halt. Quad Cities nws is definitely favoring a farther southeast solution like the GFS. The very early snow amount they are throwing out for Cedar Rapids is about 4 inches, which is close to what the GFS is showing.

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As we get closer to the event do you think models will get stronger and more organized? GGEm and GFs seemed rather unorganized with the euro more together.

this is certainly an interesting question.

im sure one of the mets can chime in better, but with the intensity of the BZ, i think this storm appears to be a good candiate for one that the models may never quite catchup too.

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I'm gonna have to examine the soundings in more detail, but the 12z NAM is showing a surface temp still in the mid 20's at LAF at 84 hours. There appears to be a lot of cold air in the lowest 50-100 mb but the warm layer aloft might be getting warm enough to allow for complete melting.

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The 12z NAM is absolutely insane at 84hr. I have to admit, I'm getting more and more excited with each 6hrs that pass. The WAA snows could easily be 4-5"+ for some areas and the defo band that the NAM is showing would continue on northeast and im guessing crush this area around here.

maybe this would be like the 1/31/08-2/1/08 storm, 5" of WAA snow and then almost 7" under the defo band. but this one has the potential to be bigger than that one and the NAM is already coming in stronger at the sfc than the other models.

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I'm gonna have to examine the soundings in more detail, but the 12z NAM is showing a surface temp still in the mid 20's at LAF at 84 hours. There appears to be a lot of cold air in the lowest 50-100 mb but the warm layer aloft might be getting warm enough to allow for complete melting.

I looked at that, it's really close and pretty hard to say..

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Not going to be any fundamental shifts with the GFS, but since only 25-50 miles in the track could make a huge difference for some people's sensible wx, that's not saying much.

So far we've avoided any major shifts across the board model wise for a few runs now, helds lend some confidence that we're narrowing things down a bit. GFS should still deliver to a widespread area.

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The baroclinic zone at 850mb on the NAM is just insane. Not only is it going to make for intense precipitation, but there will be very sharp cutoffs to precip type for a given area. An area could be sitting in an amazing sleet storm, while just 50 miles west they're getting buried by very heavy snow.

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I looked at that, it's really close and pretty hard to say..

BUFKIT shows more than enough warm air to melt hydrometeors (on the order of 100-120 J/kg of heat -- you only need 10-12). The question on the NAM would be sleet versus freezing rain, as LAF appears to ride the line between FZRA and PL for a while on Mon night and early Tues with the initial batch. The end of the run shows 180 J/kg of negative energy under the warm layer, indicating sleet for the start of the second part of the system (at 84 hr).

Edit: I should also mention that there's some theta-e folding on the Bufkit profile here too Monday night, which indicates the possibility of some convective elements to the precipitation.

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