LiveBlog: First Day of Spring SNOW

11:02am
This morning's icing has come and gone. As expected I didn't see any real slow downs on the roads, but some ice did glaze the trees. I saw a couple posts online of icicles forming on webcams, but I didn't get lucky enough to see that in my weather cam timelapse. However as I sit at my desk and look out the window, I did see a pretty rapid melt when our temp got above 32° at 9:30am.

We're almost to 35° right now, and the higher we rise, the longer it'll be before the changeover to snow this evening.

I've seen some ridiculous snow totals forecasted already today. Unfortunately I believe a lot of people saw snow models and thought that was a forecast. As I said yesterday, those will not be accurate because of melting.

For snow lovers I'm seeing a trend in the HRRR that worries me. It has the low developing and moving a lot closer to us than originally expected. This snapshot from 2am is a lot further west than expected. By as much as 50-100 miles:

The red circled area is very warm, upper 30s. I was expecting a full changeover by 11pm, so if we're still this warm by 2am this could put a huge dent in totals. If this verifies, I would push my entire snowfall map about 60 miles north. And it's not just the short range meso models picking up on this, the NAM has the heaviest snow totals pushing all the way in to Indiana now, with changeover happening much sooner there. If this warm pocket moves in with the low in to southern Ohio, our snow event may become a total bust here in Central Ohio.

I'll update later with what I hope will be better news.

3:01pm
This is why you don't model chase. Now the HRRR has shifted colder again. In fact if you believed the simulated radar, a good chunk of Central Ohio would be getting very heavy snow around 2am:

I don't discount this solution, but I still think there's some merit to the warmer models from earlier.

Honestly at this point it'll be a nowcast situation. To figure out what's going on I see that temps have now leveled out for the day at 40°. So how soon does it drop? How fast does it drop? We've had N/NE winds all day, when do those shift out of the NW? Until then we're still due north of the circulation and too warm for any changeover at all.

We're still a few hours from sunset and the onset of any precip at all. Now we watch.

8:21pm
Remember that earlier HRRR snapshot I shared earlier showing rain and 38 degrees at 2am? While it seemed to depict the warm pocket pretty well, it did not nail the temp. Here we are after 8pm and I just dropped a couple tenths below 35, with snow mixing in across the area:

The margin is thin from rain to snow right now. The areas to the north and in eastern Fairfield County that are snowing right now are only a couple hundred feet in elevation from what most of Franklin and Pickaway Counties are. That tells me it won't be long until this warm pocket of rain changes over. That's when the accumulation starts.