It’s a stormy night with heavy thunderstorms running along a frontal boundary stretching from Louisiana up into Wisconsin. This is the first of two systems this week which will bring a rounds of heavy rain and sporadic severe weather with backside snows.

Here’s the current weather chart off weather.com showing the front and the line of storms tonight.

This first system in many respects is setting the stage for the next system which is currently spinning into the West Coast. As system one barrels through the Great Lakes and Midwest over the next 24 hours, it’s going to draw some very cold air that’s currently over south-central Canada, down into the Plains and this sets the stage for the more potent systems to push into the West bringing major snows to the Inter-mountain West before it’s showtime over the Central and Northern Plains.

So here we go, by 24 hours (later Tuesday) you can see the first system sliding east and this will bring heavy, thundery rains with local storms across the Southeast up through the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast while bitter arctic air sweeps down from the Canadian Prairies.

Now by 48 hours that system has now pulled a lot of cold air into the Plains while the second system slides into California. Bigtime change here as 80s are gone and you’ve got heavy, thundery showers, strong onshore winds, big mountain snows even around the LA Basin and look out for waterspoouts offshore as very cold air aloft gets drawn in from the Gulf of Alaska.

This system pushes into the Great Basin and look out from the Lake Tahoe area across to the Wasatch resorts to the east of Salt Lake City, this I-80 corridor could get hammered by heavy, windblown snow.

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Check out these 850 temperatures later Tuesday. This shows you the kind of cold air coming down thanks to system one.

The second system slides in during Wednesday with the surface system sliding into the Central Plains while the vigorous upper low hangs back over the SOCAL. The upper low will feed energy into the surface low and it’s with all that nice cold arctic air firmly established that things really go to town in a corridor from where the northern surface low connects with the upper low. In other words, look out for a major snowstorm/blizzard to develop from southern Colorado through Kansas, Nebraska into possibly Iowa later Wednesday into Thursday.

Here’s the 100_500 thickness by Thursday morning.

Of course it’s as the system gets out onto the Plains do we get the adequate moisture available for the heavy snows over the Plains. This is the primary moisture source for a Plains snowstorm and by Thursday, major rains and potentially some strong to severe weather will break out over Texas as a lot of warmth and copious amounts of liquid will get forced north into the storm and swung into the cold side. This will fed that raging snowstorm from Denver to Omaha to Des Moines. So, how much snow may fall from this?

We may see a swath or corridor of 6-12 but within that, 12-18 inches. This could be one of the biggest snow event for parts of the Central Plains in several years.

Latest GFS snow projections looking out from now till Saturday.

 

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