Today I learned that whenever the midwest gets a huge storm during the winter, it always stems from a Colorado low.
As you can see, the Barometric pressure has continued to drop (and is still falling!) This means that the snow storm is still moving in. You can see that the Low is continuing to move towards us-but because we still have winds from the south east I expect the storm will pass above us. Right now they are calling for 1-2 inches of snow, but I predict that we will get a lot of freezing rain/sleet because if it passes above us, then we will end up in the warm sector of the low. Just south of the low will have conditions that are warm and moist-which will result in rain/sleet/snow. This area carries air from the Maritime Tropical air mass.
TUESDAY
8pm-Let the Snow Begin
Here are some charts from Tuesday evening. In the first map you can see the jet stream and you can see where the Low currently is (the little swirly guy right at the base of minnesota).
This map shows the low (also located towards the base of Minnesota, corresponding with the jetstream map) And you can see that it has continued to move towards the northeast throughout the day. You can see there is 100% cloud cover in the midwest, and areas associated with the winds that are supplying the low coming up from mexico, and the winds associated with the Low throughout the middle United States.
In this water vapor map you can see that where we have 100% cloud cover, we also have water vapor. The water vapor patterns, wind patterns, and cloud patterns, are all related to the Low pressure system. I have drawn the wind direction and the Low pressure system on the two maps below to show the relationship.
The winds have started to shift and are coming a little more from the east than the south east than they were earlier today. This makes me think that the Low pressure system will hit us more directly than we though earlier because it doesnt have such direct southeast winds pushing it north of us.
After looking at the weather forecast, I noticed that they are predicting us to receive 4 inches of snow, rather than the 2 inches of snow that was predicted earlier. If the winds continue to shift throughout the night I believe that we will get even more snow. Although I do not know how to predict if the winds will shift, I do notice that as the Low pressure system nears us, the winds have begun to feed into its counter clockwise direction. This makes me wonder if the winds will continue to shift in a counter clockwise motion (until they end up coming from the north) as the storm nears.
One thing that I have found interesting throughout this, is that the two stability charts shown above show a highly stable atmosphere. This leads me to believe that the snow storm wont be bad, because stability charts related to severe storms will not look like this.
Here are two pictures I took tonight of the snow!
Weathering the snow & rain in the design lab Haas!
(& showing friends how to look at weather maps and understand what's going on!)
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