Wednesday (1/4) Morning Weather Briefing
GOOD MORNING!
Our cold front rolled though overnight and temperatures will keep gliding backward today. Arctic air is spilling east.
Wind chills will get pretty nasty today; by mid-afternoon they will be mostly in the lower teens.
Lake-effect snow will set up east of Cleveland today into tonight but the wind direction will not be favorable for many of the bands to work their way south. Still, a small accumulation will be possible from Mespo to Greenville...but no farther south.
THURSDAY'S "SNEAKY" SNOW
A system will spread light snows into the Ohio Valley on Thursday. The "bullseye" of a few inches or so is likely to be southern Ohio into eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, as shown on this map (showing odds of 1" or more):
BUT I am concerned that some light snow will creep farther north and give the WFMJ viewing area a small accumulation in the afternoon and evening hours. The NAM Model depicts this:
Often you hear us talk about a 10:1 snow to liquid ratio (so 10" snow=1" of rain). That's a decent rule of thumb but reality is often different. In this arctic air mass the ratios will be more like 20:1 or even 25:1, meaning that it's "easier" to get accumulating snow even when there isn't much moisture to squeeze out of the atmosphere.
So, I am concerned about an inch or so of snow causing slick travel for the evening rush tomorrow. the short range ensemble (SREF for short) model suggests a couple of inches is possible. The average of all 21 flavors of the model is about 2.8".
So, stay tuned on this one. Often it's these kind of events that lead to the most travel issues.
COLD BUT QUIET
The Friday-Sunday time frame will be frigid with highs near 20 but generally quiet otherwise. Saturday will be a problem for parts of the Southeast but that storm is a miss for us.
We could see flurries and snow showers Sunday. Quite windy and cold!
LONG RANGE: BLOW TORCH!
As I have been talking about all week, the rest of January looks quite mild. The turnaround starts next week:
The 10-20 period is a full-on blowtorch.
Our winter forecast's top "analog" year was 2005-2006. What happened in January 2006? TORCH!
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