gboudx wrote:I'm looking forward to A.V.'s data that shows the Sunday arctic front won't be a big deal and will only be cool. It would be an epic bust of a blue norther becoming nothing more than a garden-variety cool front.
gpsnowman wrote:I'm sure it has something to do with a massive SE ridge extending to the Phillpines that is going to swat all the arctic air back where it came from because arctic air has no business making it this far south. I'm thinking this front has a different idea. I have the data but my dog ate it.
Trust me, this thing will be a failure; the only debate will revolve around how much of a fail it is (slight, or severe).
Think about it. The previous arctic blast this month was supposed to bring SE TX the first freeze of the season, and yet temps didn't even get close to freezing (no lower than 38-39F), not even the areas north of I-10 were the freeze warnings were. Denton was supposed to be in the teens, and yet it only bottomed out in the lower 20s.
The forecast is basically hanging on the thread that is US snowfall cover. From what I see right now, there doesn't appear to be too impressive of amounts over the country. All that bare land can make all the difference in regards to cold front moderation, and things can be quite exponential if enough of that land remains:
http://images.intellicast.com/WxImages/ ... scover.gifAnd, as always, moisture from the Gulf and/or E-Pac always ends up streaming in, and making a cloud layer that prevents temps from bottoming out too much; it happened on the night of the "Polar Vortex" (Jan 7, 2014), when Houston was supposed to reach teens, but instead bottomed out no lower than 21F for Bush, and 25F for Hobby.
And where is the HP and it's trajectory? That can make all the difference in regards to how cold Texas gets; from what I've seen, it looks to be too far east up north, meaning that there'd have to be a westerly component to the trajectory in order to strike Texas the way it has to for the forecast to be correct, and as we've seen, weather has a west-east trend during the fall-spring period:
http://www.weather.gov/forecastmapsRecords to check the temps on any particular dates in question:
http://w2.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=fwdhttp://w2.weather.gov/climate/xmacis.php?wfo=hgxTherefore, I just don't see this degree of temperature swing and cold happening. Of course, they are always fine-tuning these temperatures based on real-time trends, so they still have to chance to make the necessary corrections to be as accurate as possible.
The posts in this forum are NOT official forecast and should not be used as such. They are just the opinion of the poster and may or may not be backed by sound meteorological data. They are NOT endorsed by any professional institution or 
. Really though, if you are hoping for snow on Christmas at least there is a well modeled storm for awhile now. It is better than last year, when we were waiting on how warm it was going to get.
