A classic mid-latitude cyclone maturing. I won’t type much on this post, just going to let the figure below do all the talking. Needless to say, the virtual snow chase target of Columbia, MO I picked late night Sunday night is looking very good as per the current conditions and all that heavy snow still to come. Blizzard or near-blizzard conditions are underway from Oklahoma City to Wichita to Emporia and things are getting bad in Kansas City. Winds will only increase in intensity in Kansas City.
Dodge City, you ask? -2F, -28F wind chill, very very light snow, and a total snowfall of about 0.3 to 0.5″ (that’s a guess looking out the window).
Extreme wind chills right now in western Kansas. Garden City’s 6am observation was -2°F with a 30 knot wind gusting to 38 knots. I’ve never seen such an observation this far south. That calculates to a -30°F wind chill! What’s just as amazing is it’s still colder upstream, so cold advection continues! Actualy air temperatures by midday will likely be several degrees below zero in Garden City and Dodge City on unprecedented arctic cold air advection.
Wow. Wow!
Here’s the 6:00am surface map. It will be a very very long time before I see another surface observation map like this again for western KS/northeast CO:
It’s a precipitation explosion! Well, the event has commenced. Our spectacular 1/2 to 1″ of forecast snow for Dodge City has started, but look at what’s going on southeast of here. Freezing rain and sleet is blossoming across North Texas and Oklahoma. There are a lot of Facebook status reports of heavy sleet with thunder and lightning around Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The warm layer aloft appears to be maximized around 775mb, per the RUC, and I used that to gage the freezing rain and sleet corridors. IDV is a wonderful tool to combine radar mosaic and RUC analysis fields. It’s the closest thing I can get to an AWIPS display. See the figure below:
