Flakes evade us once again Sunday

Where oh where is the snow? It’s January and here we are, with no snow on the ground, and a potent winter system that will miss us well to the south.

A large mass of clouds and wintry precipitation is making its way out of the Rocky Mountains, with widespread snow and a wintry mix developing across Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. This marks the beginning of very large winter storm that will bring significant impacts from Wichita, KS all the way to Cincinnati, OH!

A Winter Storm Warning is currently in effect from Wichita to the United States East Coast, where well over half of foot of snow could fall between now and Monday morning. A Blizzard Warning is in effect for most of eastern Kansas, including Kansas City, and into north central Missouri. Ice Storm Warnings are also in effect for portions of southern Missouri, Illinois and northwestern Kentucky. What a MESS!!!

Again, this system will not be impacting our area, much to the dismay of those who want the snow. A surface high over southern Canada will be directing a cold and dry fetch of air right into our area, keeping any significant moisture well to our south. The upper level jet stream will keep the strongest forcing well to our south as well. With that said, the odds are stacked against us 100 to 1 on seeing any sort of meaningful snow around here.

Future clouds and radar shows the intensity and impressive nature of this system as it swings across Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and points east. For snow lovers though, it just shows another missed opportunity, and what would have been a good one at that!

So far this season, we are nearly a foot of snow below average, with only about 7″ of snow falling. We are also already just over 1″ of snow below average for the month of January. That didn’t take long! The bright side is we have already seen more snow than we did all last winter, which only brought 2.8″ of snow to the Rochester, MN area.

The brown grounds and cold temperatures have many of us wishing for a coating of snow, but when it comes to the system passing us by to the south, well…it looks like we will have to patiently wait a little longer for that fresh blanket of flakes.