Arrival in North Platte. I’m staying at the Quality Inn along I-80, arriving about 9:30pm or so. It is currently 41°F here and is already snowing west of here in Sidney. The motivation for this trip was to experience one last good winter storm, and the timing fits perfectly with my days off work. I am not due back to work until Saturday morning. The peak of the storm is expected to be roughly Noon tomorrow (Thursday 10th) through Midnight or so. A classic upper low bombing out over western Kansas puts this portion of the High Plains in the cross-hairs for 10+ inches of heavy, wet snowfall. There’s some question about how much this snow will blow around (versus plastering against everything) given how wet it is expected to be, however, north winds will increase to 25-35mph tomorrow afternoon with frequent gusts above 40mph. This could be quite fun!
I chose to do this versus severe local storm chasing for the simple reason being I could not have made it down to the Abilene, TX area earlier today immediately following my last Midnight-8am shift. If I had a chase partner that could leave with me right when I got off work, I could have done it, so I could sleep on the way to the target, but it was not to be. Also, I had considered giving Thursday a shot for low-topped severe storms near the surface low, but am not overly excited about the prospects of seeing anything worthwhile — that being said, I think there could be an interesting low-topped supercell or two very near the deepening surface low tomorrow perhaps along the KS-NE border. I really liked the looks of the winter weather aspects of this system, so I thought "what the hell" and decided to head north to a location I thought might get plastered given the track of the 500mb and Surface lows. So I chose North Platte. I’ll post a couple weather maps in my next post.