Thursday- Just 24 Hours Left

Welcome back to the old weather blog and thank you for checking out my blog the last couple of days as I've shared my opinion about the upcoming snowstorm. We had over 400 visits yesterday, and that's not even including all my friends viewing through Facebook! We're right around 24 hours away from the onset of the potential big one for southern KY (and a whole lot of other folks for that matter including my neighborhood in southern WV.) I suspect a whole lot of people are about to have a bad day, much like one of my favorite TV characters.


No we wont' be thwarting terrorist plots or dodging tactical nuclear explosions, but we will be dealing with the largest snowfall parts of southern KY have seen in several years. Most of Southern KY is now under Winter Storm Warnings or Watches, here's the main impacts you can expect from the storm:

*Travel is going to be messy Friday night- Sunday AM for south central and south eastern KY and from after midnight Friday in southern WV. Road Crews will likely have a hard time keeping up roads during parts of the storm.
*Power Outages shouldn't be a widespread problem, but could be an issue in areas already rocked hard by our large December snowstorm.
*Just be prepared to possibly be shut in for a day or two since travel on side roads will likely be quite hazardous even after the storm passes.
*Extreme cold air will move in behind this storm.


So there's the headlines of what to expect, now here's the break down via the Canadian forecasting model of how things should play out.

Friday Morning:

Friday Afternoon:

Friday Night:

Saturday Early Morning:

Saturday Late Morning:

Saturday Afternoon:


Saturday Evening:

Sunday Morning:


Okay I'm going to break this down in a time-line of events according to the model:

Friday Early Afternoon: Snow should start in Western KY including Bowling Green early afternoon, we will likely experience a period of Virga before the snow actually starts reaching the ground as the air will be very dry as our storm moves in.

Friday Night (After 6:00PM): Snow should be going across most of southern KY by this point, once again it will take a bit for it to get going as the atmosphere will have to moisten up a bit before the snow will hit the ground.

Friday Late (Around Midnight): Heavy snow across most of Southern KY, snow going at this point near the I-64 corridor. Snow getting going at moderate rates across the coal fields of WV. Areas seeing heavy snow at this time could see near white out conditions and along the TN, KY border you could see snowfall rates of 1-2"s per hour.

Saturday Morning (Around dawn): Moderate to heavy snow wrapping up in bowling green but continuing points east to include all of southern WV at this point. Many roads will likely be covered in many areas south of I-64 at this point.

Saturday Mid-day: Heaviest snow now located in far-eastern KY and most of southern WV. Snow really lightening up west of I-65. Light to moderate snowfall continues for area west of I-75 to I-65 through the late evening.

Saturday Evening: Flurries and light snow west of I-75, east of I-75 to the KY/WV/VA border, light to moderate snow, moderate snow hanging tough in southern WV.

Sunday Morning: Snow lingers in WV mountains, while most of southern KY wakes up to clear skies and temperatures in the single digits or possibly below zero:



By Sunday afternoon, highs go generally in the low 20's for southern KY and WV and mid 20s for around I-64 north in KY.

So there's your time line of events for how I think this is going to play out. Now let's start talking totals, first I'm going to give you the latest GFS and NAM totals.

GFS:



NAM:


As you can see both models showing a fairly solid hit for southern KY and WV, with at least 5"s of snow being very likely. Now we're going to do something I normally don't do and I've ever seen done before on a weather blog. There's a program most meteorologists use called BUFKIT that allows to read model data in a graphical form for a specific city. One of it's nifty features is you can load up data from the NAM and GFS, and then run an algorithm on how much snowfall that city would see according to that model run. Here's what the NAM and GFS are showing snowfall wise for some selected regional cities, plotted on Goggle earth.


I think the map is fairly self explanatory, but just to make sure you understand, the total by the N is the NAM's take on snowfall, the G is the GFS. But enough about models, time for my second call!


As you can see I moved the 5-10" line south of Lexington just a bit and added a swath of 2-6"s just north of Lexington. I still think these lines could shift a bit more before all is said and done but I'm fairly confident in their general location. Like several other weather sources have said, 50 miles will make all the difference with this storm. You can watch this bad boy as it moves towards our area on the radar below, and see the latest watches and warnings as well. Another update coming tomorrow, until then take care!