Some people in Southeast Michigan have already had accumulating snow this winter, but the people living in the eastern portions of Macomb County have seen pretty much no snow at all. The good news is that the models are showing that we could get accumulating snow Friday evening into Saturday morning! However this isn’t a sure thing because, as usual, there are still uncertainties to deal with. The different models agree on the basics but not on the exact path/strength of the system. This plays a big role on who gets what. Considering the fact that the system that could bring us snow is still near Alaska, it is no surprise that the models do not agree this far out. Anyways, below are a few images of what is being forecasted as of this afternoon. As it gets closer and the models begin to converge on a solution, I will write another posting with more information.
Image courtesy of PSU eWall. Click to make image bigger.
The above image represents the upper level system (upper left image), the surface low (upper right image), and the 6-hour precipitation totals (lower right image). This image is from the NAM model…I selected the NAM model because it was the most aggressive with snow totals. However it does represent a few concerns…one being that the NAM has the upper level system much stronger than the other models. Another issue is the NAM is forecasting the track of the surface low pressure system to be a little further north which can cause warmer air into our area and change the snow over to a mix precipitation or possibly rain. Click on the image to make it bigger.
Image is courtesy of HPC.
The second image represents the forecasted precipitation total for a 24 hour period beginning on Friday at 7am and ending on Saturday at 7am. Most of SE Michigan is between 0.25 and 0.5 inches of precipitation, and if we use the average 10:1 snow ratio, that is about 2.5 to 5 inches of snow. That range sounds correct given most forecasts are showing 2-4 inches. You can see that there is an area near the Ohio border that is forecasted to receive above 0.5 inches of precipitation.
Image courtesy of HPC
The final image represents snow probabilities for the same 24 hour period as the image above. It gives SE MI a 10% chance of receiving 4 or more inches between Friday morning and Saturday morning. I know 10% sounds low but as I said earlier, due to the fact that the system is still thousands of miles away from Michigan, it wouldn’t make much sense to go a lot higher at this point.
I didn’t proofread this posting so if there are a lot of typo’s…oh well.
Chris
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