Update 1/18/16

For a month or so I was expecting a pretty cold period about mid-month January.  The cold did materialize as I was expecting, but it invaded the high plains only briefly.  Here were the coldest readings this morning...







The reason the coldest air moved farther east, I think, is because briefly the atmosphere had a westerly wind burst off the east Asian continent and the momentum traversed laterally instead of amplifying into a strong meridional component.

I also had been expecting a strong central plains storm somewhere between January 15-21 and in the last post I did Friday I had basically given up that notion.  However, there still is several minor systems that have potential to bring snow to the eastern plains and points east.  I'm really not sure at this point why the systems are amplifying farther east.  There will be one minor one on Tuesday that will bring snow to eastern Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and probably northeast Kansas.  The second system will amplify but again, affect mainly the same area as the Tuesday system.  That leaves, for the most part, the high plains out of any significant precipitation this time around.

Here is the satellite image from this Monday morning...





The image is busy!  the southern branch of the westerlies had two systems.  The first is the X1 located near Las Vegas.  This will be the fast moving system that will bring snow the areas I mentioned above.  The second system, X2, was just a disturbance.  The issue with this one is it was near a split in the jetstream, so confidence in it's evolution is low.  It looks like it should move rapidly into the Rockies by Wednesday and then amplify over Kansas or Oklahoma on Thursday.  At this point I would put the most significant precipitation across the roughly the same area as what will occur Tuesday.  However, there is still a possibility that it could deepen quicker, moving precipitation farther west into the high plains.

Here is the expected precipitation for this week and into the weekend.


Beyond this week, there should be a warming trend into the weekend and next week.  But, the jetstream will remain active so we'll have to watch for possible storm development later next week and into the first few days of February.  More on that in the next post.