How many times have we said that? It is pretty normal for the models to be too fast with the arrival of the precipitation, it is usually the last 48-24 hours before the arrival that they figure it out. So now we are looking at light snow starting a little later in the afternoon as moisture jumps a ride on a jet streak and moves north into our area.
Here is what that jet streak looks like tomorrow at 2 pm. You can see the little green area coming over the four corners
Here is the light snow over the area by 5 pm.
Here is a zoomed-out version showing where the trough is in the west at the same time.
By 2 am Friday you can see the trough moving closer and start to nudge the moisture east.
By 8 am Friday a piece of the initial energy from Thursday is developing into a storm on the plains and the remaining moisture has been caught up by the trough. The cold front is draped across Utah splitting the state in half.
Snow should continue until late Friday then this system is going to merge into the Plains/Upper Midwest storm. The best news we could get would be another delay of 6 hours on Thursday. I don’t expect the trough to be delayed any further on Friday.
I don’t like two-phase storms like this but they sometimes leave left-overs so we could have that to look forward to. I have been vocal about these types of storms all week and don’t want to rehash everything. I think the models are finally handling this storm a little better. We still have 24 hours of model runs, anything can happen but as you can see the totals have come down, I tried cautioning everyone all week that there was a lot that had to go right to achieve some of the totals we saw in the early model runs.
Here is the GFS
Here is the Euro
Here is the Canadian
Tomorrow I will do a couple of Updates throughout the day so stay tuned, I still expect Wolf Creek to do a foot or better, but I will dial in the “bullseyes” around 9 am tomorrow.