Merry Christmas to all!! I hope this Christmas has brought joy into your homes this year.
One out of my four semesters completed of graduate school; 25% done!! I know that these two years will fly by, and I am happy to say that I am not failing and am in good standing grades wise… for now. What you don’t see from your local on-air meteorologist is how much physics and math is involved with the weather–sometimes I wonder if I am smart enough for this field… pondering the scary thought of the fact that I will technically be scientist in 2 short years…until then, let’s talk about a bit about current weather.
I am writing to you all because there’s an impacting storm that has been showing up for almost the last 5 days for the middle of the next week. There are a couple of things I want to talk about before getting into the details of the potential storm.
- The Arctic Oscillation
The AO is forecasted to go deep negative in the next few days– the deepest it has been in the last few months. What does this mean? When the AO goes negative, it means there is a greater chance for cold air to be released into the mid latitudes and storm systems tend to be more organized and deeper. Cold air has been a bit of an issue this winter, so this would tell us that we could be in position to have cold air present.
2. Cold Front on Sunday
You can see the cold temperatures in Nebraska and Iowa moving our way. How deep this cold air can propagate southward could impact the storm during the middle of next week. This cold air is important because due to the potential strength of the storm, it will bring in a lot of warm air, so it is important to already have cold air in place.
Finally, our storm next week. When I see this map, I would have one reaction in the winter and one reaction in the spring. In the spring, I would be really excited for a severe weather set up in Oklahoma, Eastern KS, Missouri, and Iowa, but in the winter, it just looks like just a lot of rain to me.
……and it looks like that’s just about right. Bloggers, this would be a very strong low pressure, and if it could just track about 200-250 miles further south, we would likely experience an impacting winter storm with all of the above when it comes to precip types. This is just 1 model run, and there is a model that has a more snowy solution, and we are still 120-140 hours away from this storm– a lot can happen between now and then.
Right at this moment, the trend is for a rainy middle of next week. It has hard to predict details this far out, but I would predict 80-90% of this storm will likely be rain with 10-20% maybe some snow with the most likely times being at the onset of the storm before the temperatures warm up and at the end as the storm passes by with cold air being pulled in. I will be tracking this the next few days and would like to have an update by Sunday if things are looking anymore interesting.
I am happy to announce that with the help of my good friend, Joe Roberts, I will be moving my blog to a new platform next month. I am very excited to experience What Goes on Outside in a new way very soon!
Merry Christmas to all!
Jack
What Goes on Outside 