1630  EST  JAN 10

FINAL WORD ON THIS     EVENT….

The periods of the sun this afternoon over South Central Virginia when skies were supposed to be clouding up is a pretty troubling sign if you want significant winter precipitation in Central Virginia.

Once again the medium range models have done a fabulous job in showing the threat for major winter storm for the  East coast .   Yet for   some   reason which is really hard to explain….  everybody from Arkansas to Boston is going to have seen a significant winter storm    except for Central Virginia.  That is why all the TV stations last Friday and last Thursday talked about the threat for significant winter weather and snowfall for sept Virginia.  That is what I did was talk about this event since December 29.

There are two ways to look at this.     One is the unsophisticated  self  absorbed    way  which is  based on the   your  backyard.     If  the only thing that determines whether not the forecast from  10 days ago has turned out to be correct   is the amount of snow in your own backyard …  well then  THIS  forecast has busted    …  and   that is true   if and only if  you live  in central Virginia.    It does not matter    if it  has snowed  20 feet of snow from Atlanta to Boston.   If you have this  perspective and  YOU  don’t get the snow   then  nothing happened.

Or you can take the more sophisticated point of view and realize that for a long range forecast like this…       this has been an almost perfect forecast track …  except for a small portion of the  Middle Atlantic states known as Virginia. 

As I said on the web site in the discussion on Thursday or Friday  from  last week that in order to get the big snow in Central Virginia we had to keep the southern piece of energy strong.    This is the piece of energy which bought the 14″ snow to Huntsville Alabama…  Heavy snow and ice to Northern Mississippi  and Atlanta …    to northwest portions of South Carolina    and a  ice storm into Western and central North Carolina. 

Instead what has happened is that this  1st piece of energy  has collapsed completely…  But only just in time so that Central Virginia doesn’t get  decent snow. 

This sort of bizarre snowfall pattern which always manages to screw things up  over Central Virginia has gone on for more than a decade.  The top 10  LEAST  snowiest winter    at Richmond… going  back to  1887…  feature   3 of them  in the  decade  from 2000-2009  and  two more  at in the top 20.       Even last winter which many think was a fabulous winter in terms of snow in Richmond and Central Virginia…  was actually a series of  snowfall  that in every case   was the lowest   snow total   in   the   state.

This time around what is killing    this  event for Central Virginia is the fact that the precipitation reaches   the North Carolina Virginia State line around 7:00 PM this evening.  And then it sits there for next 12 hours taking all that time to move 70 miles to the north.     During that period a lot of the cold air currently over Central Virginia begins to fall apart so that once we begin snowing temperatures are are already close to freezing in the upper levels of the atmosphere.

By 1:00 PM the northern edge of the snow line will be very close to Fredericksburg Virginia.  Interestingly enough in the next 6 hours the snow line shifts and north from Fredericksburg to Philadelphia  a distance of 225 miles in 6 hours.

The question then becomes why does it take 12 hours for the  snow band  to advance 70 miles…   to move from the Virginia North Carolina State line to Richmond….  But it only takes SIX hours  to move from Fredericksburg to   Philly.?

Part of it has to do with the dry air but if that was all there was to this then the snow certainly would not advance into   Philly in 6 hours from Fredericksburg.     Clearly the  development of the  coastal Low  speeeds the snow   band growth   over    MD and DEL.      The best case scenario for Central Virginia would be for   3   or 4 inches of snow and that  is assuming that the snow comes in by 1:00 AM   and  that the sleet changeover is delayed a few hours. 

Barring that from happening the most amount of snow we can expect is   1-2   inches.  It is also quite possible that very little snow were sleet or any precipitation of any kind falls on Tuesday as there is a bunch of model data which shows a very dry air mass and no significant precipitation of any kind falling over the Piedmont or Central Virginia all day on Tuesday.

 Some will   make the argument– and some   meteorologist in fact  did   make this argument  on the facebook page   back on JAN 8–   that it is the dual low  structure… which often   means  much less snow than what the  Models   Originally are  depicting   for  Virginia.

  True….  up to a  certain point.  Dual Low    pressure  systems do NOT  bring 14″ of snow to  Huntsville  AL and  8″   + to the  Northern GA…  and 8″  over    northwest SC  and  snow and ice to Raleigh.       Ergo  if the   1sy    piece of energy in the southern Jet stream  did NOT  die      the snow would be   faitly  decent  in central VA.

 There are no  more snows  or winter    weather events   on the  Horizon    for the  next 7 days.

1130 am   9 JAN 

CLICK  ON   THE IMAGES   TO SEE  FULL SIZE 

As you can see the  Bottom has fallen  out   with regards to central   VA    and especially the  Richmond   area.   AGAIN.

1500  EST  JAN 8

   I am clearly   going with the     last  few   runs of the    euro and euro ensembles   which have  really    been on a steady    TREND  of showing a  BIGGER Low  as  we get closer   to the   event and with MORE precip.    I   do not know what to  do with the   GGEM ( canadian) and GFS  models  since every other  run those  models  flip  flop.       In addition the    GFS ensembles  are clearly   showing  BIGGER  low  with  more precip   than the   operational  runs and looks more like        the  European  model .