Weather

Actions

It’s Spring… but Winter weather returns midweek

Posted at 10:22 AM, Mar 21, 2016
and last updated 2016-03-21 11:10:31-04

WEST MICHIGAN- The first day of spring officially arrived at 12:30 AM on Sunday morning, so it’s just supposed to be warm now, right?

564564564

Mother Nature didn’t get that memo, obviously, and there’s a Winter Storm Watch in place for our area beginning Wednesday and continuing into late Thursday night.  What does this mean for us?  Winter weather is expected in some form for the middle portion of the week, and confidence is increasing in some sort of wintry precipitation beginning late Wednesday.

RPM

Looking at Future Track HD at 2 AM, we see several different colors.  The familiar green, yellow, and orange colors are various intensities of rain.  The pink is a mix of rain, snow, sleet, and freezing rain.  The purple color is snow.  This is where the forecast becomes difficult because of the timing of the transition from rain to snow.

GFS

NAM

The track of this storm depends on the amount of snow/rain/other frozen precip we’ll receive.  Right now, several of the major computer model solutions offer a northwesterly storm track.  This will drastically affect our snowfall totals.  This is also why the southern counties aren’t a part of the Winter Storm Watch at this point.

TEMPS

Depending on the timing of the arrival of colder air Wednesday night into Thursday, we could see nearly a 30 degree temperature shift between a couple hundred miles!  So there are lots of variables with this storm so far.  We’ll continue to update you on the storm’s expectations.  For now, expect some sort of wintry precipitation.  Amounts are still way up in the air at this point, and we’ll keep you up to speed when we have a better handle on the situation.