The consensus of global forecast models develop a Nor’easter that will move up the East Coast this Friday. There will be accumulating snowfall on the NW edge of the precipitation shield somewhere over the TN valley. This means that places like Bowling Green and Nashville could see their first “big” snow of the year.
Since the storm is still four days out I won’t go into the specifics, but here is a sampling of the models. The European is the farthest west and least snowy (click here – hour 96). The Candian is too far east and would keep the snow over eastern KY (click here – hour 96). The GFS the past two runs has shown anywhere from 2-4 inches of snow for the Bowling Green/Nashville areas (00Z – 06Z). Here is a snowfall model of what “could” happen if the 00z GFS were to verify.
Looking at the synoptic setup, there are no storms downstream to slow the evolution of this storm, which means the storm should remain positively tilted and stay far to the south of KY. The trend for storms this winter has been for the models to underestimate the track of surface lows and to project them too far SE of their ultimate path. If the NW trend that we have seen all winter starts to show up on the models, it could mean that this storm will follow the current track of the European, which would put the heaviest snow over the Ohio River.
