Farmer’s Forecast: Winter Weather Watch
By Nick Mikulas
I'm confident you've heard of wintry potential across Louisiana for the coming weekend. I'll let you know what I'm seeing, and add some links for you to use give yourself an idea on the threat for your immediate area. As always, I recommend everyone have a good, trusted, and local source that forecasts for your area. Let's take a look at things.
The basic set up is a slow moving upper feature out west that will send moisture, and disturbances that will create precipitation. This will happen on top of a shallow Arctic airmass that could arrive in north Louisiana as soon as Friday evening, and should press southward through the night, and into Saturday. Models are surprisingly consistent in showing a threat for freezing rain and sleet, especially north of a DeRidder to Opelousas to New Roads line. That line will fluctuate in the coming days, as Arctic air intensity is tough for models to accurately grab onto this far out. The trends have been colder over the last day and a half, and as of this writing, it looks like models are starting to stabilize. That said, we have about 4 days to go before this system would become a reality. If you remember last year's snow storm, we had pretty wild swings over the 36 hours leading up to that event. While I think we will see wintry weather in Louisiana, I'm unsure of who sees what since we are still several days away from this happening.
Truth be told, I don't know how long it would take you all to prepare for an event like this. I think there is a realistic chance for disruptive freezing rain and sleet to fall, especially north of that line I mentioned above. Up near I-20, the signal is pretty strong, and even if we were to miss the precipitation, it looks like some very cold air will move in for the weekend, and early next week. I'm going to do daily updates on this, and will be updating a lot more on my Facebook page, which is Meteorologist Nick Mikulas. I'd say the chances for accumulating ice run from 10-20% near I-10 to 60-70% along I-20. I'll hold off on getting into amounts, but this system does have high end potential if it comes together as currently forecast.
Here are some helpful links for you as this event approaches.
This is a link to the Winter Storm Severity Index. You can play around with this, and see the chance for minor to extreme impacts... https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/wwd/wssi/wssi.php
This is a link to all of the winter weather products from WPC. This could be a little cumbersome, but there's a lot of information. https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/wwd/winter_wx.shtml
This is a simple one. This is the link to The National Weather Service. This is where you can find all alerts, and a zone forecast for your specific area. https://www.weather.gov
That should be enough to play with for now. I know this can have significant impacts on the agricultural community, and I don't take a forecast like this likely. I hope I have some better news with tomorrow's update!