Good Morning, Everyone!
Depending on where you live… you either didn’t see anything of issue or a full-blown ice storm. The range between the two may be as little as 50 miles. The surface temperatures since rain started to fall late yesterday evening determined the severity of the freezing rain event. As of 10 am, the reports of ice accumulations from the National Weather Service I have is as follows:
Audubon, IA – 0.5″
Oakland, IA – 0.4″
Harlan, IA – 0.3″
Onawa, IA – 0.25″
Little Sioux, IA – 0.25″
The immediate Omaha metro seems to have experienced icing confined mainly to untreated side streets, parking lots and sidewalks. The Omaha icing appears to have been localized since overnight low temperatures (eyeballing the overnight surface observations out of Millard, Offutt and C.B.) bottomed out at 32°/33° which would’ve been MUCH worse if temps fell into the upper 20s as I originally forecast.
The worst of the icing occurred north and east of Omaha where temperatures fell into the upper 20s overnight. You can see a loop of the surface weather observations (temperatures are in red) between 10 pm and 10 am CST here:
Here are liquid equivalent (or rainfall) reports from 6 am Tuesday through 6 am Wednesday CST, from the National Weather Service:
It appears that the heaviest of the precipitation occurred over much of central and western Iowa with precipitation totals of at least 0.50″! Keep in mind that the time range of the image included precipitation that occurred before the freezing rain began yesterday evening.
For the remainder of the day today, look for some leftover patchy drizzle and patchy freezing drizzle. Overnight, watch for some patchy black ice as low temperatures will fall into the middle/upper 20s in the Omaha metro, so any puddles of water that occurred as a result of the rain and snowmelt from the ice event will become frozen.
Looking ahead…our next round of precipitation will occur over the weekend. We’ll see mostly rain from late Friday night through Saturday, but there is a possibility of a rain/snow mix or just snow on Sunday. The 1200 UTC GFS shows a track of the surface low still taking the potential heavy snow well to our north across the Upper Midwest. We’ll refine our forecast for the weekend tomorrow and Friday, but this weekend system appears to not be a big snow event for our neck of the woods.
Have a great rest of your day and take it easy with the patches of ice out there!
-C.T.