StormChazer

My new rule for the rest of this "winter" is unless we are issued a winter storm warning, I'm not going to speak of it.....ok,..unless the models are in 100% agreement for a monster, I'll talk about it then, lol.

If anyone was wondering who got it good yesterday.

Interesting. If that’s the thermal profile of the atmosphere now with light precipitation, I’d think that means when the heavier stuff moves in and drags the colder air down that we’d see all sleet and snow coming down moderately to heavy.

Lightest bit of rain, sleet and snow all simultaneously fell in south Tulsa. As I type it’s straight sleet now. If it’s like this now, curious if that means sleet later when it picks up.

It'll be good to watch those temps down there to see if they start dropping.

I'll be honest here. Tulsa NWS is doing the best they can, but I think they've conceded to the fact that this is nowcasting at this point. We truly just won't know until the precip arrives. It's hard to predict if it will rain hard enough to pull the colder air down and cool the column enough to counteract how warm it gets beforehand. I mean......how does one calculate the needed rate of rainfall necessary to counteract each degree? If it's 1 degree warmer than predicted, how much heavier does the precip need to be to cancel that out, etc? Kudos to TSA(and Norman) as this stuff is just a mess to predict. But until it starts falling and we see where that transition line is setting up, it's just all about using climatological norms, and and weather balloons/models to try and predict this, which in the 11th hour, is a crapshoot in this kind of set up(imo).

It's oddly therapeutic for me to do this. Here is the 12Z 3K NAM. I outlined the 2 inch contour and highlighted Tulsa county. If this verified this way, I would rage. What is it about this area? It feels supernatural at this point! lol

Models do seem to be going cooler tonight. Tulsa Mets/news still not impressed at all. Wonder if this will catch ppl off guard.

Local met Mike Collier in Tulsa not even remotely biting on this thing.

12Z Canadian FWIW.

Beat me to the punch on the GFS! For better or worse, I'm definitely not hearing much about this storm from local news outlets, and we're 24 hours out. I feel like this has the potential to drop 2-3 inches of snow/sleet in the Tulsa metro. But there's a BIG difference between 2 inches of snow and 2 inches of sleet.

When I saw that map I just laughed...what a cluster....lol. Like I said earlier, 1/2 inch of sleet is more than enough to turn the roads into havoc; I'm especially worried about the evening rush hour in the Tulsa metro. Here is the 06Z GFS, still aligning with last night's 0Z GFS and then here is the 12Z NAM. Definitely some agreement in these two

A follow up to that last post. That picture of the road is just hard, slick ice with ZERO give. A week to remember!

The latest gfs bringing the heat on snow/sleet just south of Tulsa. The heavier precipitation is in eastern OK/western AR, if the cold air is stubborn enough and doesn’t recede(as these shallow systems tend to be resistant to the warm air winning out like the models depict) then I think there’s a real possibility of a small swath of moderate snow or sleet combo in said area. I’m concerned on how much of this falls as sleet. I need to check the soundings. Several years ago when I lived in Dallas(Denton to be exact) we got FIVE inches of sleet....it shut the city down for about 4 days straight because the sheer amount of ice on the roadways was insane. They called it the cobblestone ice event. When cars would travel on the thick sleet that first day, it carved out inconsistent tracks in the road, and then it refroze each night to this extremely pot hole, bumpy, slick, HARD sheet of ice that made driving literally impossible. Crazy times. All that to say, is half an inch of sleet is enough to turn the roads into an ice skating rink, so I’m curious to see if that’s going to pose a threat in this or not.

Last ones I promise!! These two are from 2013-2014 and 2014-2015. Fun fact, I moved to Tulsa I’m the spring of 2015, so all I’ve known since I’ve moved here is a snowless land...