THURSDAY SNOW!?

OK, It's been mentioned a few times now... let's take a look at few maps...

Here we have temps and RH at 850 mb or about 5000'. The -5 isotherm correlates well the band of heaviest snow. In the map, that line is running right through NW AR and down into the River valley.

Precipitation for the 6 hours period prior to 6:00 PM on Thursday amounts to a little better than 1/10 of an inch... so an inch plus of snow, but what's happening prior to this? We'll look at a few atmospheric soundings or vertical depictions of the temperature and dewpoint profiles along with winds.

At 6:00 AM, 850 temps are at 0 C, but below, the atmosphere is above freezing, so likely this would be rain or perhaps a little freezing rain. The surface temp is mighty close to 0 C! The sounding itself though is near saturated to mid-levels and the wind field is predominantly out of the SSW.

Lastly, this chart represents the time of 6:00 PM. This my friends is what snow looks like on a Skew-T chart, though note the wind direction. Winds have now shifted to the WNW. This is post frontal snow and we're on our way to drying out. The atmosphere is just saturated up to about 750 mb. How long will this hold out? & How long had it been since the change over to snow? These are some big questions and ones that we'll hopefully have to answer in the days to come.

THINK SNOW!

Posted by Ted Zarras at 8:54 PM