As we continue to draw ever closer to our next significant winter storm, we wanted to provide some of our latest thoughts. This isn’t a post that will hash out snowfall accumulation ideas or precipitation types, but instead will provide details on our expected track and potential liquid equivalent precipitation amounts. With so much hype and hoopla around this storm for the past couple weeks, lets just sit back and look at the “bigger” picture, as opposed to trying to sort out details that, quite frankly, are still too early to lay out with any certainty as I write this late Friday night
Here’s our (IndyWx.com) expected track of the low Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday afternoon. We used a blend of the GFS, European, and Canadian operational model data, as well as the GFS and European ensemble data sets. We think surface low pressure tracks out of northeastern Mississippi (Tuesday evening) through north-central Kentucky (Wednesday morning), and into Pennsylvania (Wednesday night) before a secondary low forms off the northeast coastline.
This is an ideal track for a winter storm across central Indiana, but specifics such as strength and depth of the cold air, potential southern convection, and forward motion of the storm will have to be sorted out over the next day, or so. Early indications are that while this storm will take a “good” track for winter weather lovers here across central Indiana, the speed in which the system will be moving may reduce snow and ice accumulations from what they otherwise could be. That said…early raw numbers suggest .50″ to .80″ amounts (liquid equivalent) could fall in the Tuesday-Wednesday time frame which is significant. Case in point, a standard 10:1 ratio that would suggest 5 to 8 inches of snow- assuming the form of precipitation fell as snow through the entire duration. Again, that is far from a certainty at this point.
Ignoring items such as model snowfall forecasts and precipitation types, just looking at the expected track would suggest central Indiana is very much in the game for a potentially significant and disruptive winter storm Tuesday into Wednesday. We’ll have to fine tune precise amounts and precipitation types in the next day or two. Additionally, much colder air (below zero once again at night) may blow into the state behind this storm for mid and late week before we gear up for yet another winter weather maker heading into next weekend. We still have a long way to go in this pattern…