Greetings and welcome!
130am-
We are under a winter storm watch tonight, along with a special weather statement and a hazardous weather outlook.
The storm for Wednesday night-Thursday is still on track to hit somewhere in the eastern half of WI with a lot of snow. The latest out of the models has the NAM bringing the storm in pretty much perfectly to bring a lot of snow, something along the lines of 10-15″.
The GFS is less ideal with the low pressure passing about 100 miles farther south. That one could end up a 3-6 storm instead of 8+ inches.
The 9pm news had a good handle on the storm according to the NAM plots, This link will probably change in the morning when their morning forecast comes on. The 9pm version showed the heavy snow right in our area and like I said, something like 10-15″.
Here are the latest NAM and GFS plots..
You can click the images to make them larger.
While it isn’t carved in stone exactly who will get the heaviest snow, we will most likely get some.
I mentioned the other day about how the storm is very powerful and was shown intensifying almost to the minimum central pressure of a Cat 1 hurricane (980mb). What that gets us is a lot of cold air pulled in by the storm and a lot of wind. The 9pm forecast said that they were expecting 35mph winds. Looking at the maps I’d probably say that is about right or a little conservative.
There will be significant blowing and drifting of the snow, and the NWS is warning about very difficult travel conditions Thursday and Friday.
I looked it up and the NWS says
Blizzard Warning
Issued for winter storms with sustained or frequent winds of 35 mph or higher with considerable falling and/or blowing snow that frequently reduces visibility to 1/4 of a mile or less. These conditions are expected to prevail for a minimum of 3 hours.
My point is that if we see as much wind as I am expecting and the heavy snow like on the NAM model, we will get close to that criteria.
The other angle on this is that those strong cold north winds should give the lake effect snow belt up in the UP and north central WI a nice Christmas gift. Even if they miss out on the system snows, the wind off of the lake might bring a significant snowfall.
As Slug mentioned in his comment yesterday the panned areas on the trails along F between here and Lakewood and along 32 going north past Townsend looked like they fared pretty well when the rain soaked into the packed down base from the clubs panning the trails. What is left is freezing in as a nice little ice base. It will be a good start for the high traffic 32 railroad grade, and with a little snow it will be fine to ride.
Around here preparations are under way at a hectic pace. It will be a full day today so I am off for some ZZZs. Have a good night and thank you for visiting!
RJB