Wham, Bam, Its Going To Get Yuck Again!

[Feathers and Fins]

thunder in rogers and sleet and snow mixed. temp on digital outside says 11 degrees. This is a weird storm.

[jdmidwest]

What is sleet any way, mini hail?

3 inchs of sleet here. Maybe we ducked the ice. 5-9 inches of snow coming around 9 pm tonite. Shame it does not fall during the daylight. I like watching a nice fluffy snow fall.

BTW, we had a wind gust awhile ago that shook the house. That snow will be piled up into big drifts when it comes.

[Old plug]

I think the worst of it is to come for us from LOZ down to northern ARK. IF we are going to have a storm up here I want the wind to continue for a few days. I have a notion if it stops we. are going to have a lot of Ice again.

[Wayne SW/MO]

It still hasn't materialized here. We've had just enough to cover the ground. So far the anticipation has been worse than the storm.

The forecast here is 3-6" of snow tonight. I haven't noticed any real bad wind, but the thunderstorms passed a little south of us.

[Quillback]

Made it through the day without a power outage. For that, I am thankful.

[drew03cmc]

All we have is about 2" of snow and an inch plus of sleet on top of a sheet of ice.

[Quillback]

Just watched the forecast - we could get 4" of snow tonight.

[Feathers and Fins]

Rumor mill is possibly a dusting on Wend as well... Someone find me that groundhog so I can kill it

[Al Agnew]

Jd, the St. Louis station weather people showed that sleet happens when precip leaves the clouds as snow, hits a warm layer not far below and melts, then hits a cold layer still well above the ground and refreezes as little pellets (while hail, I think, starts out in the updraft of big thunderstorms, goes up high enough to freeze into big chunks, and then falls so fast it doesn't have time to melt). Freezing rain goes through the same three layers, but the lower cold layer is so close to the ground that it doesn't have time to refreeze when passing through it.

At the last minute last night, Mary and I decided to drive home from Springfield where we were staying with her friends after giving my talk Friday night. Reports were that nothing was supposed to happen before 2 AM, so we left at about 9 PM. Started hitting a light mist around Waynesville. Got a little heavier by Rolla, with temps at 27 degrees. Almost decided to spend the night in Rolla. By the time we got to Cuba, where we would ordinarily leave 44 and come across Hwy. 8, it was raining and the temp was 25. We checked the MODOT website and it showed 44 clear all the way to St. Louis, so we decided to stay on 44, figuring there would be more traffic to keep the ice down. By St. Clair we were seeing cars off the road, and had slowed to 40 mph. At Six Flags it was getting very obviously slick and cars were off the road here and there, and we were down to 35 mph (and cringing when big trucks passed us going twice as fast). It was extremely slick until we got off at Hwy. 141 to cut across to 55. The ice was an inch thick on the front of the car and around the edges of the windshield. But 141 was just wet, and so was 55 down to Ste. Genevieve, although I drove it at about 50-55 mph in case we hit a slick spot. Got home at 2:30 AM, and in the last 10 miles it had stopped raining. Not much fun.

So far we have a half inch of sleet and ice and a half inch of snow on top here at the house.

[Mitch f]

Scary stuff Al.

Was talking with a friend today and we both agreed this weather has been really weird recently. Normally a front comes thru and you can expect a couple of days of high pressure mild days after the front. Last year that didn't happen...after the front we seemed to always have howling winds and never seemed to get that break between storms. Just an observation