High Plains Drifter

It begins!  We just changed over to snow a few minutes ago.  Here is the radar image just after 11am… very heavy snow is coming!!

Convective snow over far southwest KS!  Radar image below with lightning strikes reveals thundersnow over Morton and Stanton counties!  It’s still a sleet/rain mix here in Dodge at 36 degrees…. soooo close.

Rain-Snow line just northwest of Dodge City.  I just woke up after about 4 hrs of sleep to see what’s happening outside.  It’s not snowing yet, but I do hear pings of sleet against the window… I knew we’d be damn close to the rain/snow line at this time here.  It’s S+ in Garden City on the latest ob at shortly after 9am CDT.  Radar shows a ton of precip heading up this way as the comma-head of the low develops right over Southwest Kansas.  I think just northwest of Dodge City is where the deformation axis will set up and this is where the 8-12"+ snow axis will likely be.

Just a bit farther south and just a bit colder.  Wow!  I’m at work now, and I just glanced at the new 00z NAM… it now shows precip type becoming snow in Dodge City sometime between 12z and 15z!!  This is much earlier with much of the precip falling as snow.  There could be a historic 10"+ of snow in Dodge City.  Looking back at the record books, Dodge City has not recorded 3.0" of snow or greater after April 10th… since 1894.  Anyway, more later!

Here are a few images I put together from this morning’s NAM model run valid 36hrs from now at 7pm Friday 4/13:

Historic April Snowstorm for Southwest KS?  All the major model runs are still pointing to a major accumulation of heavy, wet snow beginning early tomorrow morning over extreme western KS and developing southeastward during the day.  The timing of the rain/snow line is the real challenge.  Per the NAM model, we may see snow here as early as 3pm or so.  The NAM shows a warm layer aloft centered around 750mb that will keep us from being snow until about this time… despite 850mb temps being about -1C or so several hours earlier.  Man, the Canadian model QPF is still going nuts!  Check out the 3-panel I put together from this mornings run:

Estimated 12-hr QPF for Dodge City:
ending 24hr:  ~10mm (.39")
36hr:  ~21mm (.83")
48hr:  ~17mm (.67)
Storm total:  ~48mm (1.89")

One last snow "hurrah" is on the way for western Kansas.  A significant Southwest Low will develop over New Mexico tomorrow (Thursday) and will mature just to the southwest and south of western Kansas.  A cold Canadian surface high will be in place to the north to provide cold enough air for snow.  As it stands now… an compromise of all the model solutions would suggest heavy, wet snow accumulating to 6 to 12" over far west-central and northwest Kansas.  It is possible that the track of heaviest "wrap-around" precipitation will go over the Garden City-Dodge City corridor, with a large percentage of this precipitation being in the form of snow.  We may see significant accumulating snow in Dodge City if the Canadian and ECMWF models are close… and usually they are accurate models in the 60-72 hour time frame.  The two graphics below show the 12-hour precipitation ending Friday evening (the 13th) and 500mb Low placement Friday evening: 

Significant tornadoes from western Nebraska to the Texas Panhandle. The preliminary LSR tornado reports from this evening add up into the 60s I think so far…with a number of long-lived, significant tornadoes.  Early reports are that there is major damage in or around Benkelman, NE…Bird City, KS…Holly, CO.  In Southwest Kansas… a prolific supercell produced tornadoes from east of Meade northward to west of Dodge City to west of Jetmore to west of Ness City.  Had this supercell tracked 7 or so miles farther east… then significant damage could have resulted in Jetmore and Ness City this evening.  Take a look at this radar image below from around 9pm when this tornadic supercell was over western Hodgeman County, KS west of Jetmore… what a classic fish-hook!!  It doesn’t get more classic than this (see below).  About an hour before I left to go home, we started getting our first damage reports from in western Ness County of farm houses either severely damaged or destroyed.  Call Affordable Remediation for Mold Remediation Company Toms River NJ. For sump pump repairs, contact expert rochester sump pump repair services. We’ll know a lot more tomorrow.

The first severe weather event of 2007 in the Kansas City area was a pretty active one…mainly south of the metro though.  I was watching a little bit of the long-lived tornadic supercell activity unfold in the Iola, KS area while at work this evening.  Here is a StormLab graphic showing the storm reports over east central KS and west central MO:

It’s not even March yet!