WeatherTrex.com

Some of you apparently haven’t gotten as much as I have…opps.  Here’s a picture from my house.

As I crack open a “snow cap” beer (still clinging to hope!), I fear I must concede defeat.  Snow geese or no, we ain’t gonna make it to 4″.  Maybe my bird lady is right with her poo poo.  It seems that we spent a lot of our available moisture into cooling the atmosphere below 3000ft.  It seemed to take forever to get the column cooled…so many precious drops wasted!

So at this point, the light snow that will persist over the next several hours won’t be enough to overcome the wet, just-at-freezing surfaces to achieve the higher accumulations i was looking for.  At my house, I have a decent coating on the ground and my deck (insert joke here), so the real accumulating can begin, however much that will be.  My thinking now is that we will see steady light snow for another hour and then snow showers after that thru the middle of the night.  1-2″ is what it will be.  But the real danger is going to be the black ice.  The temps should really begin to drop in the next couple of hours and after midnight the roads will be a lot like ice rinks.  Be very careful tomorrow morning!  peace, trex

A wonderful lady, I have the privilege of knowing (and who poo-poos most everything meteorological that I have to say), always tells me to watch the birds just before it snows if you really want to know what the weather will be like.  Now I don’t know if this is what she had in mind, but…My wife and I are about to build a new house, and I went out to the homesite this morning to check things out…when much to my surprise a flock of geese descended from on high!  It was almost Biblical.  Now I know these weren’t really snow geese, but at least they were Canadian (i know this because they said “ay?” in their salutation).  I figure they have lots of snow in Canada, right?  So this is a foreshadowing of the snow to come. 

Just a quick post before a more comprehensive update in a little while.  I wanted to let you all know that the cold air is, in fact working its way in.  I was an eyewitness to a graupel siting at the Crossroads Starbucks in Cary at 10:45.  Some of you may be wondering what in the heck graupel is.  It’s a snow pellet that has been rimed by a coating of ice.  But that’s not really important.  The important part is that the we are just on the cusp of the cold air working its way down to the surface.  We’re in a relative lull in the precip shield now, but should see things pick up after lunch.  And some of you have expressed concern over some nameless on-air meteorologists poo-pooing the event.  While they are right to say that the most QPF will be south and east of Raleigh, that does not mean that we won’t see a decent shot ourselves.  more later…trex 

Some of you have previously heard me lament about the difficulty of weather forecasting.  I like to give the example of the surface of ocean with its gazillion little waves that ripple along the top.  The spectrum of wavelengths is almost literally infinite.  Now imagine trying to write an equation that could explicitly determine what the wave pattern looked like at any given instant on the water’s surface.  Pretty hard stuff, considering that the answer would, simplistically, be the superposition (sum) of all of those waves of varying size that we talked about before.  In this example, i have really only described one layer…in a sense, just a two-dimensional sheet.  But, of course we want to know more.  We need all three dimensions and so even if you had the answer to the first layer, you’d still need many, many more layers just like that one in the vertical.  AND…this is only predicting one quantity.  You still have to do the same thing for four or five other variables!  Do you get my point…or have i driven you into a nacroleptic seizure?  The point is that it’s amazing that we can predict much of anything given the scope and shear magnitude of the task at hand…which is to make deterministic forecasts for a gazillion individual points (using an incomplete set of equations, i might add). 

So, with that perspective in mind, determining where a low pressure system will track within 25-50 miles, 24hrs from now, and given the fact that it hasn’t really developed, would be a job well done.  Unfortunately, that 50 miles could make the difference between 1″ or 5″ of snow…or an even harder to resolve…dusting or 3″.  All this is to say that the game is about to start and the players are getting the normal pre-game gitters.

Nothing I’ve seen tonight in the new model runs really changes my thinking from earlier.  The stronger, outlier solution has come in more reasonable with it’s QPF this evening, which is a bit deflating for the glimmer of hope that you always hold onto for the forecast bust that could go explosive like the January 2000 blizzard.  So, to sum it up…a little rain in the morning before we change over to snow about 11-12noon.  I’m looking for 4″in Raleigh.  The storm will be much more established tomorrow and therefore a more predictable entity than it is tonight in it’s infantile-state.  More then.