Monster of the Midway

I can't hold myself back on this upcoming storm.  At times, I might make two posts a day if time allows.  This storm has the potential to affect half the country and millions of people with snow amounts over two feet and a swath of damaging ice.

Places like Chicago, South Bend and Detroit are prime places to see extremely heavy snowfall.  The storm would cut across the Great Lakes to target central New York and northern New England with heavy snow.  The heavy snow might be the least of the worries with this beast that heads east.

Somebody is going to wind up with one hell of an ice storm.  At this time it doesn't appear that we would be in the core of it, though we would still see a mess.

The map to the right shows the probability of receiving at least a .25 inch of ice for Tuesday into Wednesday.  Mind you this storm has a 48 hour window to operate. Meaning this map wouldn't show the entire outcome. You can see that for most of our area, we are right near the 40% chance.  As somebody who looks at these every winter, that is pretty high.  Of course, if you look at the narrow red band, it doesn't look too bad for our area.  The problem, is ice is ice.  There is no bad ice storm or good ice storm.  The only real difference is the aftermath.  Do you lose power for days or just have trouble walking to the mailbox?

I'm still confident that snow is the first kind of precipitation that moves into our area on Tuesday.   We'd see a couple of inches.  As far as the icing is concerned, I think we are right on the border.  No doubt Tuesday perhaps all the way into Thursday will be a mess.  The only thing that I am disagreeing with on many of the forecasts is the amount of rain some places will be getting.  I think somebody, maybe in the Philadelphia/South Jersey area will be in the flooding potential category.

I want to show one last map that shows why these things are so hard to predict accurately besides all the different models and patterns.

These are the current temperatures.  I drew the white line representing that cut-off of potential snow/ice/mix or rain.  Notice how extreme the temps are.  This is what can be expected all week.  Temps either cold, mild or this strange middle ground.

Look at the Oklahoma City at 35.  South of the white line in Dallas it is 66.  Follow the line and places not far from each other are separated by 20 to 30 degrees.  Shift that white line north 30 to 60 miles and you have your battle ground for the ice.