Dan Robinson
Pretty amazing to see the STL metro getting a second major ice storm this season. I can't remember a recent winter with this number and magnitude of ice events.
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Jordan Hartley
Very intense line of precip moving into the Wichita metro area. Really good band of freezing rain down starting to come together down in SE OK that will track NE. NWS put out a mesoscale discussion on the band of sleet that is moving into my area, NWS said we could pick up .5-1.5 in as it moves through.
Edit* Line is passing through in the form of sleet and its coming down hard. 3-4 CG's in the last 5-7 min. Very fun to watch.Last edited by a moderator:
Jeff Snyder
EF5
Here in Edmond, OK (N suburb of OKC), we have about 1.25" of accumulated sleet on the ground, very negligible freezing rain / glaze ice. Most of the ice on ground sfcs is likely the result of the warm ground initially melting the falling sleet. Visibility was quite limited at times yesterday, though it's been just fine since last evening.
The latest OUN AFD confirms what I was thinking regarding the "surprise" precipitation form. My best-guess yesterday was that precipitation size distribution may be the primary culprit for the sleet form (over freezing rain). I noticed early yesterday that the majority of the falling precip particles were very small, with the "sleet" looking like frozen drizzle (frozen, not freezing) much of the time. If this is the case, fall speed of the particles would have been slower than expected, thus the residence time in the shallow sub-freezing air would have been longer than usual. The 18z OUN sounding yesterday, otherwise, certainly looked to support freezing rain, with a very warm nose at 850mb, and a freezing layer than was 500-700m deep. I think that if we had larger precip particles, the drops would have spent let time in the sub-freezing air, and we may not have had a "surprise" sleet event (and we would have had the anticipate crippling ice storm). This is partly why I hate winter precipitation forecasting -- the offices correctly anticipated the much faster-than-models-projected speed of the cold front, and the soundings looked to support the freezing rain mode, but (I suspect) cloud and precipitation microphysics had a different idea. This is starting to mix into a DISC thread, so I'll stop here.
Looking at radar, precipitation is increasing west of the OKC area, with it taking much more of a convective form than we saw for most of yesterday, and there's a few "cells" with >50 dBz returns. This MAY signal that larger rain drops are falling, which will likely result in freezing rain instead of sleet for a time. Larger drops have a higher fall speed, so residence time in freezing air is reduced, and the larger drops take longer to freeze anyway. We'll have to wait and see if this continues through the day and through tomorrow, I suppose.
Greg Stumpf
EF5
Definitely convective...there has been a lot of cloud-to-ground lightning activity in that area for the past 3-4 hours.Rocky Rascovich
EF4
NOW: 11am
Here at the farm 5 NW of Piedmont, experiencing a wave of heavy sleet, and some small pea sized hail mixed in. Two cg strikes within 5 miles of the house!! current temp 22F. So far been lucky that this has not been the freezing rain event thats been expected in my area.
Rocky&familyMike Umscheid
EF4
This is one of the more unusual widespread sleet setups I've seen.... where you have both a tremendous warm layer aloft on the order of +7 to +10C with a very impressive shallow near-surface cold layer beneath it anywhere from -5 to -10C. It's clearly warm enough in the warm layer to completely melt any snow...all the way north to almost central KS and northern MO.
There's two ways to get sleet...the most typical way to get sleet is from partial melting of snowflakes in the warm layer aloft when the maximum warm layer aloft temps are anywhere from +0.5C to +3C. Below this warm layer aloft, not much "cold" energy is required to re-freeze the partially melted snowflakes as sleet or snow grains or whatever you want to call it. Above +3C in the warm layer aloft, completely melting snow, it will take quite a bit more "cold" energy to re-freeze a complete rain drop back to complete solid ice. The standard 50/50 probability PL/FZRA in this situation is a minimum cold layer temperature of roughly -6C. A colder than -6C surface layer, and your probability of completely re-freezing a rain drop (of a typical rain drop size) rapidly increases. This is the situation that has been occuring over a large area from Kansas into Oklahoma -- really interesting. The OUN 00z and 12z soundings for Jan 13th were really, really interesting with maximum warm layer aloft temp of +11C and minimum near-surface cold layer temp of -6 to -8C
This kind of winter sounding is really unusual!Michael O'Keeffe
A heavy band of sleet is to makes its way into Kansas City within the next hour or so. It is right know slamming Topeka down south to Emporia. I will keep everyone updated as it makes its way through the KC metro area.Dan Dawson
EF2
A couple small thunderstorms are passing through Norman right now. Precipitation type at my apartment is still sleet, and I just missed the heaviest cores to the north and south, but I can hear the thunder. Wheee!MatthewCarman
Moderate snow already falling across central Iowa and the ground is almost covered where I live. Still expecting a winter storm sunday night for Iowa. How bad is the ice storm in KS/MO? People are saying this is a crippiling ice storm.....
Greg Stumpf
EF5
Observed varying sleet "diamaters" with current thundersleet in Norman, ranging from very small (<1/32") then increasing to 1/16-1/8". Clearly, the frozen equivalent of small and big rain drops falling into the subfreezing layer.
Would have been nice to have gotten into one of the heavy sleets cores, but not here in SE Norman. Any reports from NW Norman?Carla Bisby
EF4
Yes it is. And I'm looking very forward to spring because of it. We currently have about 100,000 without power and it's expected to increase as we receive round 2 this evening and round 3 tomorrow. Last month when the ice storm hit I didn't lose power...this time I did (camped out at mom's house now hoping her electric doesn't go out too). Last night the lines snapped right next to my apt. Normally I enjoy the blue explosions but not when they're that close and wake me up at 1:30am.
Bob Schafer
EF5
K, so NM isn't one of the states listed for this thread, but it should be. Why not CO as well?
Anyway, have you all seen the neat vis sat imagery of the cf bdry pushing up against the Sangre De Cristos in NM? I recommend CoD...
http://weather.cod.edu/analysis/analysis.1kmvis.html
BobMatthewCarman
6 people dead because of the ice storm and it is so icy out a 18 wheeler slid off a overpass. The National Gaurd and other emergency services are being called up to help the areas needed. Anyone know how much ice has accumualted already? A friend said his brother was going to try and drive through this to kansas City from NM so he could make it in time for school and I convinced my friend to tell him to stay in Amirillo TX for the night. Anybody driving in this needs to take extra caution.Mike Hollingshead
Sean McMullen
I drove from Goodland KS back to Lincoln NE the day after the last ice storm and I mean we drove right through the worst of it. I found driving on the solid ice wasn't nearly as bad as driving on the slush because then the ice would shift under your tires. With temps much lower than the last storm he shouldn't have to deal with the slush so if he keeps it down and doesn't make any sudden movements with the steering wheel he should be fine. Does he have classes monday? Because its MLK day so there shouldn't be any classes, I know I don't.Similar threads
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