Central plains first shot of winter weather

[Michael O'Keeffe]

A strong storm system will track across Southern Missouri late this Tuesday into Wednesday. The area that seems to be under the gun includes:

Eastern Kansas/Missouri-Rain should be persisting across much of this area from most of Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. By the afternoon as temperatures drop the rain should change over to snow and shouldn't accumulate over 2 inches. If snow can change earlier in the day which is possible snow aaccumulations could reach higher amounts. The area that appears to see the best possiblity of accumulating snow is EC Kansas into C Missouri. South and East of say Sedalia to Marshall will expierence heavier rain and thunderstorms. Winds will be coming in from the north with gust reaching 40 MPH with sustained winds of 20-30MPH. Further south in SW Missouri they can see a posiblitly of a mix to wet snowfall.

Eastern Nebraska/Iowa-Further north in the Mid Missouri Valley they can see accumulating snowfall during the morning on Wednesday especially west of a Sioux City to Nebraska City line. No sure about how much they could be seeing, but may cause some road troubles.

 

[Jeff Miller]

Omaha AFD is indicating "near blizzard" conditions if the system pulls a bit farther north than expected...with strong winds and potentially heavy snow. This is of course conditional, if the system can get its act together a little bit more.

ETA model at 12z run shows a tremendous amount of QPF in Eastern Nebraska...but precip type is indeed tricky. I's have to agree with the west of Nebraska City/Sioux City currently but as we all know these things can change fast this time of year.

Troubling is that HPC has not picked up on these possibilities, and does not have the Eastern NE area in even a slight risk of 4" or greater at this time, likely siding with the 1-3" lighter accumulations currently projected. So, it's hard to say for sure. I would definately agree the place to watch is Eastern Kansas into Western Missouri for now....watching closely!

It's great to have systems to watch now, instead of being bored under a ridge of high pressure.