Wednesday, December 11th, 2013 - Evening Weather Discussion

Here are my latest thoughts on this upcoming storm situation for this weekend.  But first, the temperatures will drop to the upper single digits to low teens tomorrow morning and the high will only make it to the low 20’s.  The temperatures will then drop very quickly, reaching the upper single digits in many locations by 7 pm tomorrow evening.  The temperatures will then start to rise overnight as a storm starts to develop along the Gulf Coast.  This storm will then move northeast and in our direction on Saturday, causing light snow to develop around 7:00 – 8:00 am on Saturday morning and become a bit heavier in the afternoon and a bit heavier yet in the evening, then possibly mixing with or changing to sleet or freezing rain, then turning back to light snow in the morning before ending around 1:00 pm on Sunday.  The European model ensemble mean brings us about 5 inches of snow and then one to two tenths of an inch of ice.  Here is my concern.  I am still concerned about the run from yesterday that brought us a foot of snow.  The reason I say this is that on this last run this afternoon the storm looked significantly stronger than it did on the run this morning.  Of more interest to me was that the model shifted the entire track of the storm back toward us by an amazing 250 miles on one run.  Usually the changes in this time frame are much more gradual, usually around 50 miles at a time.  My concern would be that this could be an indicator of things to come and another shift to the west with the track would bring us back into the higher precipitation amounts that the run from yesterday showed.  In fact there were many runs in a row that showed much higher amounts in the 1.50 inch range for days prior to backing off recently.  In addition, the main piece of energy responsible for this storm is only coming on shore in southern California now and the energy will be much better sampled in tonight’s model runs.  I would not be surprised one bit, based upon the trend that I saw with the model run this afternoon, if these totals needed to be increased once more.  However, anything is possible so we will just have to wait and see.  It was extremely interesting to me to see this amount of shift to the west and increase in intensity in one model run.  We are then likely to get another dusting to an inch of snow on Tuesday as another storm approaches us from the west and attempts to create a Nor'easter along the coast.  It is then likely that we will see a dramatic warm up toward the end of next week as warm air streams north ahead of another strong cold frontal boundary.  This front and an associated strong storm will likely approach next Saturday causing temperatures to reach the 50’s and possibly near 60 degrees next Saturday, although we may also get some heavy rain.  It will then likely get very cold again next Sunday and into Christmas Day with the chance of another possible snowstorm in our area on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.  Check back in the morning, I think this may get interesting, but we will have to wait until the morning to find out.