Could It Snow This Week?

We've been chatting it up in the Storm Center, on Twitter with fellow weather friends, and on blogs about the chance of snow or wintry mix later this week. I have not mentioned it much on air because it is too far out and too questionable, but let's chat about it for a moment. SEVERAL questions to answer:

• Will the cold air arrive before the moisture leaves?
• If so, how deep will the cold air be?
• Based on that, could it be sleet, snow, or freezing rain?
• Or, Just rain?

The above image is the BUFKIT program showing the 00Z run of the NAM (or the evening data from the North American Mesoscale model). The time oddly goes from right to left. You see tonight's rain by the green bars, Wednesday's rain in the middle, and Thanksgiving's rain on the left. Also, look at the temperature line in red. Notice how it SHARPLY drops on Thursday. THAT is the cold front. If it comes in late, as it is shown above... the highs will be warmer. If it comes in earlier, the highs will be colder. Regardless, the temperatures are going to drop. This model does shows us briefly switching to sleet/snow. It's not much, but enough to catch some late-nighters off guard.

So... here it is on the map. If you click the image to enlarge, it does show a few flakes over Region 8. This would not add up to anything and would not cause any problems whatsoever, but look at the I44 corridor! Now, if THAT materialized, it would cause some issues for those people! I have family there... should be interesting!

Here's the bottom line. I'm not expecting much to happen in our viewing area. We may see some form of wintry mix on the tail end of the system, but I think most of the moisture will be gone by the time the cold air arrives.

We'll be watching it though!!!
Ryan