Happy New Year, everyone!
It seems like this winter has been relentless…and doesn’t show any signs of changing anytime soon! It also seems like if there’s any chances of snow days in advance, someone gets wind of it and the talk about more snow seems to spread like wildfire!
The “flurry” of talk for the next event is associated with a clipper-type system originating from the British Columbia and Alberta provinces late tonight and will dive southeastward into the Plains by Tuesday night and into Wednesday. Here’s a snapshot of where our Threat Tracker stands today:
Before I talk about the snow, I should briefly address the bitterly cold wind chills that we had this morning…and will continue to have today. We had morning wind chills colder than -30°F which is unhealthy, but we’ll likely have wind chills, at times, approaching -20°F this evening and tonight.
About the snow…I have a first guess of 3″-6″ for the KMTV viewing area, including the Omaha metro, that I showed on air earlier this morning. Based on the 1200 UTC GFS and NAM model output…I feel no inclination to change my current opinion. The GFS MOS is predicting a range of 2″-4″ for Omaha (however the end of this model run ends during this snow event) and the NAM MOS is looking at 4″-6″, but the model run terminates in the middle of the snow event, too. We’re looking to start the snows from late Tuesday night, but the accumulating snows will be finished Wednesday evening.
Since this will be a dry, powdery snow and the winds will range between 20-35 mph, blowing and drifting snow will become a real hazard on Wednesday. This is similar to what we experienced Saturday night, but we’ll see more accumulation from this event.
So…here are my thoughts (graphically) on the new snow accumulation for this storm:
On a related note…if you’re curious how we stand in terms of actual snow versus our seasonal average, here it is:
As of this morning, we are 3.0″ above normal, with a total for the season at 31.0″! Since Spring will officially begin on March 20, we have a long ways to go. The last season where above normal snowfall occurred was 2003-2004, where we had 3 successive snow events occur by Valentine’s Day in 2004. By the end of the third event, Eppley Airfield had a snow depth of 26.1″, which was 0.9″ away from the deepest snow on record (27.0″ – March 1960). If this keeps up, we’ll certainly set some new records.
Stay tuned to Action 3 News for the latest, and any changes to our snowfall forecast!