GFS: Winter storm by 10/13

Here in southern Ontario, there have been lake effect snowsqualls on and off all day today, and expected to continue into Friday. It would create a dusting on things, but would melt fairly quickly in between squalls. Areas north of here received a bit of accumulation from what I gather. Hope this isn't a sign of a bad winter coming!
 
We had just a few very light flurries a few times earlier today. This evening though we had a decent snow shower come through and lasted long enough to briefly dust the grass and car tops.
 
In eastern Wisconsin we got nothing more than graupel/snow flurry showers Wednesday evening and snow showers on Thursday, from the first couple of shortwaves. No accumulation and the melted snow that fell didn't even produce any wetness. The main event with this storm has been the record breaking cold and disgusting windchills so early. The low at my place this morning was 26, which wasn't even a daily record low for my period of record (1984 - Present), let alone a long term climate base. However the high of 36 shattered my daily coldest high temperature as well as beating the long term database record cold high for the date. In my period of record, this tied for the 2nd coldest October high (34 on Oct 31, 1996 and 36 on Oct 26, 1997). But this is fine....get the cold weather out of the way really early in the cold season. ;)
 
Here in the Appalachians, we're getting the cold temperatures we needed but not the precip. I was holding out hope that upslope would kick off something for us tonight, but the flow is refusing to turn northerly or even WNW. So far all of the models concur with us having a clear-sky frost/freeze. Columbus is getting a nice band which didn't show up on most of the model progs, but I don't think we'll see anything getting any closer than that.
 
We had some very heavy squall activity here today. One squall (the last to roll through) reduced visibility to under 1/4 mile (got some video), but didn't have much wind associated with it. The previous squalls has gusts in the 40-50mph range, but the snow wasn't as heavy. I had to go out and tie up one of our small trees to prevent it from uprooting (it's a 10 foot tall softwood tree).

I would estimate our total snowfall today to be around an inch, maybe two at the very most - very hard to judge with rapid melting. There is still a coating on the grass and elevated surfaces as of right now, quite odd when you consider most trees are still foliated and green.

Looks like this system will drop a bit to the south tomorrow and increase the pressure gradient once again... It also looks like it finally develops a secondary jet axis in the SFC-700MB range, within the mixing layer. This extends from central Canada through all of Michigan and back into Toronto. If anyone is still up in the UP at this time, that would probably be your best bet at seeing storm force winds and significant wave action. RUC is actually more intense with the low level winds, with sustained SFC winds of 50-60knts forecasted for the Big Mac at 12Z.
 
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