Tuesday, December 7, 2010

A Few Flurries and Staying in the Deep Freeze

A fast moving upper level disturbance will move through East Texas overnight, providing us with light rain and perhaps a few sleet pellets and snow flurries.


Anytime you have a system move over temperatures which are near freezing at the surface, the talk of a wintry mix seems to come to the table.

This system will dump some snow over parts of the Arklatex and northern Louisiana. Accumulations in those areas could be as high as 1-2."

We may see a few flurries and sleet pellets mix in with the rain, but for the most part, most of our precipitation will be in liquid form.

After this system moves out, another freeze will set up for Thursday morning, before a brief warm up takes place to end the week.

I use the word brief because several computer models are showing a surge of Arctic air spilling southward and into the Southeast United States by Sunday.

This cold blast will be due to a huge trough (dip in the Jetstream) making it all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

If you watch our weathercasts, we like to show the Jetstream features whenever it helps drive home the weather story.

The Jetstream is a fast moving current of air that separates cold air from the warm air. It also is the main storm track for most of our storm systems across the country.

The image above shows the coldest air just missing us off to the east. Even if this happens, we will still see some of our coldest weather this late fall season surge into East Texas over the weekend.

If the Jetstream were to configure itself a little farther to the west, then it may get even colder than what are forecast numbers indicate at this point.

Nevertheless, it looks like Old Man Winter may be getting an early start on winter in December.


0 comments: