If you caught our 10pm broadcast last night, we were downplaying any snow chances for Nashville. However, I was very confident about forecasting an accumulating snow in the eastern parts of Middle Tennessee, especeially the Cumberland Plateau.
I am often asked if Middle Tennessee is one of the hardest places to forecast weather. I say no, except for forecasting snow. In my 24 years of weather forecasting in Middle Tennessee, I’ve come up for a term for this…instead of “no show’, I call it “no snow”.
The situation:
Low pressure leaving the Gulf and heading though Alabama and Georgia…cold surface temps in place, with the freezing line aloft expected to drop southward by morning…the higher elevations of Eastern Middle Tennessee being more vulnerable to snow, as well as closer to the low itself. It all adds up to snow!
So what happened?
Two things that I can see: First, the low never got “wound up” where the precip would expand northward and circulate counter clockwise around it (a closed low). Secondly, we seemed to have some drier air in place aloft intruding from the north with our colder air dropping south. The result, very little precip made it into our colder air in Tennessee, with most of it staying in Alabama and Georgia. If I had the same data, I might have to say the same thing again. I felt even more confident when the National Weather Service issued a Snow Advisory for the norhern Plateau.
But don’t worry, we’ll have more snow chances this winter, and we’ll break out the snow sleds eventually.
