Tuesday, December 4, 2007

12/4 - 4pm - Clipper Coming!

Sorry about not posting yesterday... The whole Southeastern U.S. AT&T DSL service was out.

Here's the deal folks. There is an Alberta Clipper system coming tonight and tomorrow. This is simply a quick shot of moisture with some cold air coming from the Northeast in Alberta, Canada, hence the name. This does mean we will get some snow tonight.

The amount of snow accumulation will be a coating to nothing, but that's still up in the air. I'm hesitant to go with the National Weather Service's forecast in saying that we won't get any accumulation because the recent GFS models are saying that the moisture is coming further south and the temperatures will hold in the lower 30's. What they're going off of is the NAM model, which pushes any appreciable precipitation into central Indiana and keeps our temperatures a little warmer. These are very hard systems to predict because the low system is weak and is vulnerable to any slight shift in a neighboring air mass, hence the uncertainty in the storm track. It's now in Iowa and looks to be moving towards Indianapolis, which is the forecast track as of now:


(Click picture for animated radar)

One thing I want to note is that there is a secondary area of moisture starting to form on the western side of the system that looks very changeable at the moment. If this area continues to develop at the rate is has been for the past couple hours, I think we may see a little more snow than previously thought. Last year we had a clipper give us a coating (and one that gave us a couple inches the year before) that previously looked as if it would completely miss us. So just stay tuned because this forecast will change by the hour. Now I don't think we'd see more than a couple inches if the forecast track did change dramatically, but it certainly bears watching.

We'll see a pretty good warm-up by the weekend after this system passes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Its gonna snow!