Major FAIL?!?! Wow. Leave it to me to start blogging about a potential winter storm to bring the possible failure modes of this system to light. This is not looking good AT ALL. That first band of precipitation did produce 0.4″ of snow at my place, but has since ended as of about 10:45pm. The figure below explains the major failure mode with this system for Dodge City. I still think a few inches of snow are possible, but significant accumulations appear unlikely, and if it does occur, precipitation will need to reform again to the southwest of Dodge City.
Figure 1 (Illustrating/discussion potential major failure mode for a significant precip event for Dodge City):
Figure 2 (08/00z run of the GFS valid hours 6, 12, and 18):
NOTE: As I publish this post, precipitation is trying to form southwest of Dodge City back to the northwest of the major area highlighted in red in Figure 1. All is not lost…yet! Precipitation forecasting on the western plains is very sensitive to the little sub-synoptic scale nuances thanks to the “Rock Pile” just west of us.