Saturday Night....

>> Saturday, January 19, 2008

I know their are a lot of folks disappointed with this system, and I am one of them. I was really hoping to get some snow on the ground, and it simply didn't happen in many places.

Some spots did see an inch or so of snow accumulation, but like I mentioned, many places ended up with no accumulation at all, even though snow basically fell for 7 straight hours in much of the region.

Tomorrow, after my brain is back working again, I will write the postmortem on this storm and go through what happened to my forecast.

As for tonight, the light snow will wind down with no additional significant accumulation. However, temperatures will plunge overnight tonight. The clearing line of clouds is already approaching the mountains, and we will see the sky clear here overnight. That should allow lows to drop to around 20 degrees in the Charlotte region.

That is important because of all of the residual water left on area roads. Some of that water will likely become ice overnight, especially on secondary roads as well as bridges and overpasses. So, I can't urge this enough.....PLEASE be careful driving tonight through Sunday morning.

Sunday will be very cold with a high struggling to make it above freezing in spite of a sunny sky. And, then we drop into the low to mid teens Monday morning.

Down the road, I am watching the potential storm systems next week. The first one on Tuesday could begin as some freezing rain Tuesday morning. I will look at that much closer tomorrow.

After that, the next potential system is Thursday, but I get the feeling that one might pass too far south to give us any significant precip. Again, I will look much closer at all of this tomorrow.

Thank you so much for stopping by and reading. God bless!

6 comments:

Anonymous 10:33 PM  

Nobody bats a thousand dude, it happens. For the life of me, I cant ever remember a time where it snowed here for 7 hours and it didnt accumulate not one inch.

The Fzra situation looks interesting for tuesday...the GFS wants to start us off with FZRA and temps around 20 degrees.

Anonymous 11:18 PM  

You guys did an awesome job and usual. Thanks for the low panic level...

Anonymous 12:12 AM  

It is disappointing that we didn't get a lot of accumulating snow, but I certainly appreciate your insight and interpretation of the modeling. I'm still hopeful that we will get a strong winter storm this year. I commend you and your team at News 14 for blogging because it is more than just the regular forecast. Let's be like an all-star quarterback and forget about this interception and move on to the next series. I'm ready to get excited about the next possible Tuesday. Do early indications point to it possibly being a storm? Drink some gatorade and get back on the field Matthew! Let's go! We're behind you!

Anonymous 1:18 AM  

What in the world happened to the ARctic air invasion? Even early Sunday morning, the Arctic air hasn't exactly barreled into the East coast the way it was projected to do by Saturday early afternoon.

Anonymous 11:12 AM  

(cross post from JC's blog)

Storm post-mortem reveals the complexities of forecasting in a zone between mountains and an ocean.
Major kudos for the disclaimers prior to the event and the explanation of what happened. Most mets just move on as if nothing happened. They were late calling the event, then hyped it (when you could find them on the air) and without much humility, just move on to the next forecast package.

Crazy part is.....a lot of what was forecast DID happen but all eyes were too focused on the track/intensity of the low pressure. I fell for that trap and assumed the cold air would be in place.

After a delayed onset, the zone of heavy precip pretty well played out as forecast. Track and intensity were there. All that was needed was the cold air. That was the part that did not verify and voila, a dissapointing result from a SNOW perspective - but the liquid is sure welcome.

Don't think you are tooting your horn enough about Stormcast - it consistently downplayed the amount of snow although I think it underplayed the amount of liquid, too....still, better than any of the "traditional" models.

Anyhoo, my 1-2" did not happen so as Ray likes to say up on the mountain, I must toss a quarter into the "miss" bucket.

Cheers,
ANON

Matthew East 6:43 PM  

Thanks for the encouraging words...I appreciate it.

I love the sports analogy. Great stuff!

Not sure what you mean about the arctic air...pretty cold out there. Temperatures were never expected to really plummet until overnight last night.

Anon....very good analysis.

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