Sunday, January 30, 2011

Forecasts Trending Whiter as Late-January Snowstorm Approaches

Forecast snow totals continued to grow through the day Sunday. For a storm that never even made it onto the radar of many forecasters' extended outlooks as recently as Thursday night, this one appears to be growing into a modest headliner. FOX and KSTP are at the top of the snow range for this storm with forecasts of 5-7 inches and 5-8 inches, respectively. All other weather outlets are in the 3-6 and 4-6 range.


As of 6 p.m. on Sunday night, these were the final pre-storm forecasts. Look for weathercaster grades on this storm to appear some time later in the day on Tuesday.

WCCO: 3 to 6 inches
KSTP: 5 to 8 inches
FOX: 5 to 7 inches
KARE: 3 to 6 inches
Strib: 3 to 6 inches
NWS: 4 to 6 inches
MPR: 3 to 6 inches

Follow TMF on Twitter and Facebook. The history of this forecast may be found here.

3 comments:

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  2. AS I look at this, I'm wondering where you got the 4-6 inch total for NWS. I see 3-6 inches on their map, in the hazardous weather outlook and winter weather advisory texts, and 4 to 9 inches in the 3 am weather discussion. Hmm, does someone need to grade the grader?

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  3. By 3 a.m. the storm was already in process. The info I obtained -- as is our standard practice and detailed in the grading criteria -- is to take the latest predictions immediately prior to storm onset (after that, it becomes "nowcasting" vs. "forecasting"). The official NWS forecast as of yesterday evening, taken from the actual forecast (and adding together their accumulation predicted for last night, today, tonight, etc, was 4-6 inches. I'm afraid the grader was accurate but I'm glad that someone cares. :-)

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