Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Wintry Return on Wednesday

It's been soggy the past couple of days with multiple periods of rain, but winter weather could rear it's head as early as Wednesday morning.

A low pressure system currently out of the the four-corners region is already bringing rain to the Oklahoma panhandle. The low will track into southern Illinois, and as mentioned in an earlier post, if this was winter this track would bring significant snow to the area. However, since we are in the beginning of Spring its going to be harder to see that.

The amount of snow depends on a few things, the first of which is how much forcing will be present. If there is a lot of forcing taking place, this could help the air cool and bring a transition to all snow quicker. We also need to pay attention to a warm layer near the surface, as well as warm surface temperatures. Both of those would hinder how much snow would accumulate on the ground. To overcome the warmer temperatures, the snow would have to fall heavily to accumulate. This is definitely possible tomorrow, however the area in which this would happen is small. I think this would suggest that some areas have the potential to receive an inch or so of snow, but I think many will just have minor accumulations.

One thing to keep in mind though while out driving tomorrow is that roads could become slick quickly, and also that even if not much snow accumulates, it has the potential to fall quickly which will drop visibility significantly at times.

The snow won't last long, the system moves east into Thursday, and sunshine returns by Friday.

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