Something unusual happened on Tuesday morning… it rained! We had a day with rain earlier in the month… and since November 10th… otherwise it’s dry. So you can definitely tell that the rain was welcome and necessary. Temperatures have stayed well above freezing locally though… so the roads are just wet.
By the time you read this, the rain will probably be over for many places or at least be over. We should quickly see the sun come back and the temperatures climb well into the 50’s before the day is out… it’s not a bad day for April at all… I mean December.
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Provide:
Today: Become sunny and windy with highs in the upper 50s.
Tonight: Partly cloudy and cooler with lows descending to nearly 25 °
Tomorrow: Clouds and sun with peaks in the mid-1930s. More typical of December
Thusday: Moderate a little more with highs 40-45 °
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Discussion:
The rain was welcome and necessary as mentioned at the beginning of the blog. We’ll end up with about 3/10 ″ or so at KCI… with one more bot than that to the south side of KC… welcome to all! Looking at other totals… this system actually outperformed as some areas of the metro received close to 1/2 “-3/4” of rain. Here are some cards until around 8:30 am
The amounts on a more regional basis were heavier at the SE of the Metro…
So good pouring rain for lots of areas. It will break the drought for many.
From…
Our next cold front… a strong seasonal front that will bring us closer to the average tonight and tomorrow is moving across the plains this morning. There’s colder air behind… simple numbers in Nebraska.
The satellite image shows rapid release occurring on the west side… and this will quickly spread over the metro this morning.
The front will pass without incident… and it will get colder before sunset tonight… so we will have to get into the 1950s by about 3pm before the temperatures start to drop.
Tomorrow should be typical… although there may be a few flurries in the late morning or afternoon. Maybe a little sprinkling in northern MO.
Then the focus is on the holiday weekend. Well, again warm up on Friday… in the 50’s there seems to be a stronger push of arctic or western air… technically it should be air from western Canada I guess… even though it’s been really cold out there for a long time… and it’s been bottled for weeks… well, the dam is going to break and that cold air will be released over the plains on Friday.
Take a look at Friday’s GFS highs.
The front is just north of KC at the end of the afternoon and it looks like it will move towards sunset… or before 8pm at least depending on the current time.
From there we’ll be tanking… by Saturday afternoon we’ll probably be down to 10-15 ° with sub-zero wind chills. Here are the temperatures forecast for Saturday afternoon.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was colder than that locally, either.
So where does that leave us when it comes to rain / sleet / snow / ice?
There may be light rain developing as the front moves in the evening … then as temperatures continue to drop … this rain will start to mix with sleet, then we might see a period of sleet around midnight on Saturday as the new year is ringing. This is important as the roads can become slippery around or after midnight on Saturday.
My biggest concern… from about 4 to 5 days onwards is that the pavement temperatures will initially be very hot thanks to the 50s on Friday and will allow anything that falls (liquid or frozen) to melt for a while. weather… BUT as the temperatures drop FAST into the low 20s and get colder before dawn… the roads can quickly freeze and freeze up.
This will create a FLASH FREEZE situation where the roads degrade and deteriorate quickly! This can be very dangerous because 1) we haven’t had winter weather yet 2) many people may not pay attention to the changing conditions 3) treatments cannot be done everywhere at once 4) IF we have the coming rain of things he would wash off the pre-treatments. This poses a problem on several levels.
One problem we have… and that may change… is that although the air on the surface will support the snow west of I-35 around midnight on Saturday… the air above us will not. will not do at that time… and it may take a few hours to “get there” from the NW side of the metro to the SE side of the metro.
It creates this problem of mixed precipitation… sleet and maybe freezing rain as well. This creates the mess that is on the table for the early Saturday morning. Eventually by dawn everything should be ready for the KC snow to the northwest. Areas further south-east will continue to have mixing problems. This could all change in terms of the types of precipitation expected as cold air is better managed.
From 4 to 5 days, it doesn’t make sense to be time accurate with 100% confidence in precipice types when a degree here or there above us can define what’s going on.
Again, I just want to show you the setup and potential for what can happen based on decades of watching the cold arctic frontiers move through the region with winds and heat above. the surface.
All of this will be facilitated by disturbances coming / extending NE from SW.
These disturbances can create the equivalent of about 1/10 to 2/20 ″ of liquid… which will then be converted to sleet / ice and ultimately snow. So at this point a BIG snowstorm in KC is not expected (if things move a little further south though… that kicks in to some extent). An accumulation and our 1st accumulation of snow is however on the table for Saturday morning. The odds are in favor of less than 2 ″ in the subway… with N MO and NE KS on the verge of potentially receiving more than 3 ″ of snow.
Again, this is just VERY early speculation on my end… but that’s really the point of the blog. I will be more general on the air tonight, however.
Finally some nuggets from yesterday that I saw and tweeted.
Discover this snow from the Sierra Nevada in California!
200 ″… almost 17 feet this month alone! Wow! It’s great for the water / reservoirs situation in California down the road !.
The main photo is of DeAnna Blair in Shawnee
Joe
