Big Storm Coming! The Question is Where

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I'm getting LOTS of messages tonight about the forecasts for a big storm. I advise people not to pay too much attention to winter storm forecasts until about 48 hours before the storm is expected to start in your location.  The big snows are still more than 48 hours away from the central U.S. so I haven't made a forecast.

I just re-posted this image and circled the location of the low
pressure system for non-meteorologists reading the blog.
If you are wondering why we can't pin it down yet, it is because the storm is still not over land. The center of the storm is the inner-most "comma-shaped" cloud band off the coast of Northern California.

It seems that until the storm can be sampled by the land-based weather balloon network, the forecasts tend to be very inconsistent.

Comments

  1. ToddJanuary 29, 2011 at 10:20 PM

    Mike...I see that TSA and SGF offices too have kept quiet about predicting any possible amounts attm. I am one of those when it comes to a winter storm I have a "wait, lets look out the window first" attitude to see what it's really doing. I know winter storms are hard to forecast. But it's fun to see what the models are forecasting and later see how right they really were.

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