Massive winter storm over the middle of the country

This will be the weather story of the week as a huge winter storm will be impacting over 60% of the U.S. with snow, ice and wind. It won’t bring us winter weather but we will see some heavy rain and maybe severe storms early Wednesday . The real issue will be what this storm does to the weather patterns after it moves through, This will determine if a second storm that forms in the Gulf of Mexico will bring us some wintry weather late this week. Here’s how things stand today.

 

This thing is just huge with the main surface low being somewhere in the neighborhood of 990 mb if not lower over southern Illinois. While at the same time a 1050mb arctic high is over the western Dakotas. This will provide a large area with blizzard conditions Tuesday and Wednesday.

ecmwf_apcp_f48_us

The snowfall totals from this are just epic on our Futurecast model. Haven’t seen 14-24” totals forecasted over such a large area in a long time. It’s likely there could be a swath of 1-2 FEET of snow from Oklahoma all the way to Maine!mgWeb_WRF_20110131-120000_ECONUS_F00720000_PwinterSnow_R12km