Yesterday was fun! Short but sweet, but anytime you can get some thundersnow is a great time in my book. Ready for a repeat?

The models for a few days showed that feature coming through yesterday. They didn’t do a great job on timing until about 8 hours before it hit. They didn’t even really sort out what it was. It turns out that it was a small shortwave trough that worked in from West to East in a near squall line type fashion. The high-resolution model paved the way for it showing the uptick in convection. The model missed the mark on the low side of total precipitation.

High CAPE values indicate atmospheric instability which results in convection. The thunder and graupel showed up right on time and in many areas lowered the snow levels with 15-degree temperature drops. This is the beauty of a convective environment.

The models’ CAPE output can warn that the unstable environment may develop. The models aren’t at the point where they can take it to the next level and show when and exactly where these isolated storms will pop up, and how much precipitation will fall in any given area because of the convection.

An area of low pressure will make its way towards our area Monday. Precipitation should start falling after 11 am. At the moment, it looks like the snow levels should hover between 7,700 feet- 8,000 feet. CAPE values are already trending up again for tomorrow afternoon.

Yesterday morning the high-resolution model was not predicting .30 inches of liquid in my neighborhood but that is what happened. The convection led to heavy rain and graupel that quickly transitioned to heavy thundersnow. The whole thing start to finish lasted about 90 minutes. There were similar reports all around our area.

What does this have to do with Monday? I am about to show you the liquid-equivalent precipitation outputs for Monday’s little storm. Those totals don’t account for any type of convection that breaks out, which would enhance the totals and lower snow levels. So I would view these more as worst-case scenarios rather than forecasts.

Here is the Canadian

The Euro

The GFS

And the German

Thanks for the feedback from the other insomniacs regarding my midnight post! Nice to know I am not alone with my malfunction! Next Update Monday morning.

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