LiveBlog: January 12th Winter Storm

8:25am
The call comes in for early dismissal of a lot of the local schools. The forecast has changed, they said, and kids need to be home earlier than expected. The reality is I think everyone's gone in to panic now because the NWS has put out their first batch of Winter Storm Warnings in 703 days. Some people forget what those are I guess?

Here's where we have them now, a few counties in Central Ohio have been added. As I advertised yesterday, they could have a little more snow than Columbus and points north and west:

NWS Wilmington is a little disjointed with their warnings in comparison to the rest of the national map, but I agree with what they've done. In the pink areas 5"+ could occur.

What's really happened this morning is the cold air is rushing in faster than some thought. That means less freezing rain, a little more snow, but actually more sleet. Sleet is junk winter precip. It's not as big of a menace as ice or snow. It's just... there. So we'll take it for travel.

The l2z weather balloon from ILN doesn't really tell us much as the cold air hasn't rushed in. What I would expect to see here in a few hours is a deeper layer of cold air for the rain to fall through, in turn creating sleet. I'll update as the freezing line approaches.

9:06am
The front passed through Canal Winchester with a 10° temperature drop in 10 minutes. Impressive.

10:20am
Temps are dropping like a rock, but luckily road surface temperatures are staying a couple degrees warmer than the air. That should give us a couple hours before ice, sleet or snow can accumulate on the roads.

12:10pm
Temperatures have actually steadied over the past hour. We're sitting around 37° with some light drizzle, sleet and snow all mixed in. With the delayed onset of snow, I think we're looking at a huge reduction in totals, unless this kicks in soon. The latest HRRR shows we may not drop below freezing until 4pm and no snow until at least 6pm. That doesn't mean we're at no snow, but some local weathermen really hyped things this morning with this early rush of cold air. I had people coming in saying they heard 6-10".

This is why you don't go model to model.

1:14pm
It never fails. It feels like every major winter storm always gets us with a dry slot that cuts down on totals. Models do a poor job of picking it up, so when it shows 6", we could get only 3" if that dry slot forms.

Sure enough...

Just like clockwork, here it is. That'll move in before the snow, and it should also reduce ice and sleet accumulations, since this is around the time frame we'd be switching over. So this could be an all snow event for us, but still not a blockbuster.

4:00pm
We've had some sleet mixing with rain off and on for the past hour or so. We're right at freezing right now, so we should start seeing some ice accumulations on trees soon. By sunset we will transition to all snow, and accumulations should come fast. Heaviest snow will be right when the changeover happens.

6:43pm
We've changed over to mostly snow now with some sleet mixed in. Areas west of I-71 have had some slushy sleet for quite a while now, so points east seemed to have missed out entirely.

This video doesn't look very impressive, but the snow is blowing with very gusty winds.