Busy Week, First Look at This Weekend

The NWS just issued our second Winter Weather Advisory of the season for tonight along and north of I-70. We will see some freezing drizzle overnight, with a chance of a glaze by morning. We woke up to a good bit of freezing fog in parts of our area this morning, and it appears we'll have a lot more moisture to work with overnight to give us a trickier situation.

That's great and all, I'm sure this has the potential for an impactful morning commute, but lets be honest, since before the last flake fell Sunday morning everyone was looking ahead to what could be a blockbuster storm this upcoming weekend. I've held off until now to comment on it for obvious reasons: models aren't going to be definite at 6 days out. Yet I already saw snow maps posted online from Euro and GFS runs. Please stop doing that stuff, people. Models will not accurately zero in on snowfall amounts or track until at least 72 hours out.

The storm system is just now entering the US from the west coast. Computer models will just begin sampling land based data sources. We're just now getting a look at reliable model runs.

Presented without precision, here's the rough track the system should take:

It still has a long trek across the country before getting to our area. In that time a lot can happen. But at this point it appears we will have a large storm taking a very similar path to last weekend's storm. The biggest difference from last weekend is the northeast travel on the track, which will give us some challenges when it comes to the forecast.

That trajectory tells us we're in for a much stronger storm that'll have a good battle of warm and cold air masses on either side. Simply put: ice potential. 

Don't pay attention to the Euro below to pinpoint if your town is getting snow or ice. This is to simply illustrate that we have another I-71/I-70 benchmark storm. Snow north, ice in the middle and rain to the south:

This won't be as cut and dry as last weekend. Up to 5 days out we saw signals of an all snow event for us in Central Ohio for our last storm. This time we could model watch and have a different signal every time. History usually repeats itself, and in this case I can feel like an area splitting scenario is in play.

We have one more factor to take in to account: a Thursday storm. It's not a strong system by any means, but it'll move through 48 hours before the main event. That does two things; messes with models ahead of the big storm, and sometimes carves a weakness in the atmosphere for the big storm to follow.

Thursday's storm will be a cold rain event, temps barely reaching the 40s, with the low moving directly over Central Ohio. Something like that would setup a more northerly path for the weekend event. Don't write that in stone, because a strong storm should take its own path. But the slightest jog from the previous path could have a major impact.

See? This is why you don't post model images 6 days out. The number of variables that'll go in to the outcome of this event is too high to bet on one model run from one model.

I wrote all of this just to say... stay tuned. It's going to be a long week, kids.