ICON really tries but cold air is lacking 
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Pattern Januworry
- Thread starter SD
- Start date
I mean sheesh could even be wet snow honestly 
I mean lacking ever so slightly I’m saying if this is amplified at all or the rates were heavier this would easily be wet snow .. it’s easier to get over BL temps at 35 then at 40
Avalanche
Member
Def providing rates are equal. Weve already had our seasonal allotment of wet snow. Its big dawg time.
Certainly potential with that icon look tho
WTF
Saw that lol. Ridiculous, 50:1
Looks good for the NW piedmont foothills Mtns. I'd like to see other model agreement but interesting for sure.
If I’m doing the math right in my head, that’s a 50:1 ratio. That is pure powder.
Pixie dust!!!
The interesting thing is, this is one of those brief cool shots. It's not overwhelmingly cold, as you show, but it's possibly cold enough, at least for some locations. And it could trend even better.
At 138, like you showed, there is a lot of vorticity. You have two kind of messy waves approaching the eastern seaboard. They actually remain apart as the move through our area but then consolidate by the end of the run.
At 150, they are getting together...you can see the base of the trough start to take on a neutral tilt. This is when the light precip occurs. Not enough dynamic cooling to support snow, but it's close.
By 180, the system has consolidated, and you have a two contour upper low off the SE coast. And we have a similar situation inbound (except my guess is that the process would happen too soon for us if the model kept going).
Suppose the initial system got its act together 24 hours or so sooner? I haven't checked layers, but assuming we don't have a warm nose, that's probably a heavy wet snow event for more than a few folks.
It goes back to what I was saying earlier. You don't need big weenie 300 hour snowstorms. You need mid-January cold air and the puzzle pieces on the table. Sometimes the puzzle gets put together.
Absolutely… at the very least we are in a pattern that something can come together quickly to give us a chance simply because we have a normal January airmass
Where’s a gulf low when you need it?
Avalanche
Member
Belize? Guatemala?
January 2018 was pretty cold. The snow was so powdery you couldn't do anything with it.
Not bad, getting looks inside hour 200, not a good setup on the GFS but it’s a look that could improve 
ATLwxfan
Member
Yeah if I recall correctly temps started out quite marginal at the onset but then crashed and by the tail end it was as you said. I just recall 2014 as an event where we had cold entrenched for the entire duration and it made for much mayhem.
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Iceagewhereartthou
Member
I hear you fro, it has really been almost impossible to get the cold to materialize, especially east of the mtns the past couple of years. We know what happened last Feb and so far this year there has been a lot of cold around the country but it still hasn't come east of the Apps, with the only real exception being the snow in VA last week.
So far this cold weather season (Nov to present) GSP's lowest temp has only been down to 25 (and that was Nov) and the lowest highs only down to 45. For CLT the lowest numbers have been 23 and 45. For RDU its 24 and 41. Let's be honest, those are incredibly wimpy cold numbers and will not produce snow outside of a perfectly timed system, and those are rare. The pattern since Jan 2018 has basically been for the cold to always dump West of the Apps. It is great seeing the cold modeled for us but it has to progress inside of fantasy range and actually materialize. Kicking the can down the road runs us into Spring eventually. I am hopeful that we'll get some of this cold for real, then maybe we'll have something to track on our side. Gotta have the cold if we want snow. It is nice to see the cold at least modeled, but again, it has to materialize. We'll see what happens.
? 
Here we had 0.75” liquid equivalent of a combo of ZR (0.50”) along with 2” of sleet and snow, combined. That week was the coldest here in several decades! The sleet and snow stuck around largely unmelted in shady places for an almost unheard of 5 days! It was the highest liquid equivalent for a winter storm since 1922 and the first major winter storm since December of 1989! It was 100% wintry precip with temps staying at 32 or colder, a rarity in itself.
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