Potential Storm Around Wednesday

There is still the definitive possibility of a winter storm affecting SE Michigan sometime next week. However, due to a complex scenario, the forecast models have been jumping all over the place with an incredible spread of solutions. Essentially, two pieces of energy have the potential to phase and form a storm, and since the pieces are pretty strong, the resulting storm could be rather significant. In general, the more these two pieces combine, the farther north and west the storm would track. An alternative scenario is that the two pieces don't combine at all and the storm tracks well to the south of SE Michigan. Essentially, you guys could get anything from cloudy/cold conditions, to a major snowstorm, to a major rainstorm.

Since the two pieces of energy are currently over the Pacific Ocean and unable to be sampled well, there is not too much data being fed in to the forecast models right now, and as a result, there has been maddening inconsistency from run to run. For example, this morning's run of the ECMWF had a low pressure system tracking from Northern Mexico to Georgia, while this evening's run had the low tracking from St. Louis to Chicago, a shift of thousands of miles. In general, this evening's model runs have shown more favorable solutions for you guys to receive a winter storm around Wednesday, but there is still a ton of uncertainty. A great example of this is that since I wrote my last blog yesterday afternoon the models have shifted the timeframe of this storm back about a day.

Hopefully there will be some more certainty as to what will affect you guys around next Wednesday by the time I write another blog tomorrow afternoon...as I plan to have a much more detailed discussion then. It may be a video post as well...it depends on what I feel like doing.