Storm Tuesday through Thursday

OK. I finally broke down and created a blog so that I could share my weather knowledge to everyone. I know I am a nerd. Before I get started I just wanted to apologize to everyone for my spelling and grammar. It is really not good.

I know everyone has heard by now that a storm is coming this week. Honestly it looked much more impressive Friday than it does now. :(  The storm is in a perfect position for a classic snowstorm over much of the western carolinas. Unfortunitley the storm took longer to organize than expected so the artic air that had been in place is retreating and there is no High Pressure over New England to lock in the cold. The Mountains are a different story, anywhere from 5 to 10" of heavy wet snow will be possible above 3,000 feet.

This looks like a good soaking rain for much of the Carolina's. East of I-77 should see at least 1" of rain from this system. Back here in the foothills I think we could see up to 1/2" of Rain. I do think there is a good possibility that we change to snow at the end of the storm area wide. Although accumulations still look limited to the Northern Foothills of Caldwell and Wilkes Counties. Even there I am only expecting a dusting to 1" of snow. There is still some uncertainty with this event. I would not be suprised if I had to up the accumulations outside of the mountains a little bit. I will look at the models in the morning.

This is a picture of the GFS (Global Forecasting System) model Wednesday evening about 9 pm. The Blue dashed line is the "rain/snow" line. You can see a substantial amounts of precipitation still falling over western north carolina and this should be in the form of snow expecially in the foothills and mountains. Again, depending on how much cold air the upper low brings to the surface and how heavy the snow is falling will determine our accumulations.

This is a different model, the NAM (North American Model), showing very similar condition over the western Carolinas.

I think Winter Storm Watches will go out sometime tonight or in the morning for the mountain counties. I would not be suprised to see Winter Weather Advisories go out for parts of the foothills and maybe northern piedmont for Wednesday night.  Everyone keep in mind that this could still change either way. Upper level lows are very hard to forecast, weather models do not handle forecasting them very weell and sometimes we can get suprised. I will keep you posted.

This is my lastest thinking on snow accumulations as of Monday night at 10:00 pm.

I know some of you are sick of it, but not me! Hope I can increase some of the foothill totals in the morning!!!

Night.