This past week has seen another couple of decent precipitation events for much of the area. Even parts of the moderate drought area did get at least some precipitation. The following map shows where the precipitation occurred and how much fell (rain and snow):
With the latest events, the amount of precipitation (rain and melted snow) has been rather impressive for the cold season! Since January 1st, many areas have had more than 3 times what is normal! This has also occurred where it has been "wet" for 5 to 6 years! Here is a map of the percent of normal for the period January 1 through today (Feb 27):
In the previous post I did on the 21st (you can read it by clicking here), I had mentioned "hints on perhaps another system around the 3rd of March, give or take a day or two". How does that look? Well, let's look at the satellite image for today:
The Jetstream continues to be a configuration to "bottle up" the REALLY cold air well to the north. But it continues energetic enough to keep it active. There is a pretty wet storm off the California coast. But, it is not moving much at all, unfortunately. It appears that it will spin down before making much progress east or before it is able to impact the mainland. The potential March 3 system based on the pattern cycling is present! But as of today, it is merely a minor disturbed area of the atmosphere across the northeast Pacific and is denoted by the red circle on the image above. That is almost 3,500 miles from Kansas!
There is a really good chance that it will amplify and dive south by the weekend, and into a decent storm! However, almost every computer forecast model takes it way south and then east across Texas and into the lower Mississippi Valley by next Tuesday (the 3rd). There is still at least a very small chance that the eventual storm comes out farther north and west which would impact at least the eastern High Plains! The Canadian Forecast Model has actually had that solution several times in it's model runs of bringing widespread rains back into much of Kansas. Confidence of this happening though is very low. We'll see.
Yesterday at a meeting I mentioned the 10th as a potential date for another system. There continues to be a hint at that also by some of the long range models.
As far as temperatures - more of the same of ups-and-downs. But, nothing Arctic in nature is showing up nor is it expected for a while - if at all.
Finally, you probably have seen this image floating around...
That white stripe is only a 8 to 12 mile wide band of snow that fell a couple of days ago. That was 8 to 13 inches of snow that fell in just 3 or 4 hours! Either side of it - NOTHING! That can be attributed to mesoscale forcing that is extremely difficult if not impossible to forecast it's existence or location even 6 hours from occurring!
A satellite view (green is snow cover in this image)
Finally....April 21-22, 2020. Some of you know what that date represents. More on that in the next post or two.
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