Rain and Snow Update!

Current Radar 

Wet Afternoon

If you pan/scroll the above current radar, you can see the rain coming from the SW.

The HRRR in motion, below, shows the heavier rain may wait until later in the day.

However, the HRRR may be overdoing the coverage of rainfall. Other models depict more of an off/on rain event. Actual radar returns to our SW suggest they may be on to something.

Isolated thunderstorms are possible. The Storm Prediction Center thinks a few strong/severe thunderstorms could develop to our SW:

As I write this, we remain outside the risk area for severe weather. I expect it’ll stay that way. I mention it only because the rain/storms we’re getting are coming from that area, so they’ll need to be watched. We’ll be tweeting it today.

Overnight Saturday – Sunday Snow Chances

This guy has the right idea:

Well, maybe a few flakes.

I kinda like the NAM4 model’s take on this. It pulls the center of the storm into southern Indiana at midnight, and trails very little moisture behind it as the freezing line starts to swing through:

After looking at the sounding on this model, the temps aloft are all below freezing, but as you can tell from the map, the freezing line at the surface will not have made it here. That means very light snow would fall (the column is saturated, therefore, no Dry Air Monster will be there to eat the snow), and then melt. Briefly. Meh.

The GFS model also follows this thinking. This looks to me like a Middle Tennessee Special — by the time the freezing air arrives, all the precip will have escaped:

A classic novel of woe and longing.

The HRRR seems to suggest we’ll see some flakes very late tonight. I don’t think we can rule that out, but even the Euro is lifting the snow north and east of us.

We think this will be worth watching, but end up being a non-event.

Suddenly Cold

At 6 PM, the temp should drop to 47°, which is still pretty mild for January.

But by midnight: 38°. Sunrise: 31°. We’ll hold steady around 30° during the day, then as the sun starts to go down, we’ll drop into the 20°s. Winds will be whipping in from the NW, making it all worse.

Sunday night at midnight the temp will be 21°. The wee hours of Monday will bottom out at 18°.

Next Week

Another arctic front arrives Tuesday, and delivers another unexciting/small possibility of snow Tuesday night. NWS-Nashville says “[n]o impacts are expected other than a very light dusting potential for the upper Cumberland.” (That’s not us).

Late in the week, the models depict a series of upper level waves that could come together and make some rain or snow, but the “models go all over the place” (says NWS-Nashville) so there’s not much of a point in talking about it.

This website supplements @NashSevereWx on Twitter, which you can find here.