ABOUT AS BAD AS IT GETS FOR APRIL...

It's Tuesday night April 3rd and I'm watching the snow fall outside my window. It's spring but it looks and feels a long ways away. Just look at the 11pm temperatures Tuesday night. What the heck!

And here's the winter storm warnings and advisories that are in effect to the north.

It doesn't get much better in the next 10 days. Here's the forecast temperature departures. We're right in the teeth of the nations coldest air through mid April.

Aside from the cold, snow is far from over in many parts of the Midwest. The ensembles of both the EURO and GEFS are simply remarkable. I would be impressed with their outputs in January but for April these snow forecasts are flat out remarkable. I can't recall seeing numbers this large and widespread through April 19th.

Here's the GEFS ensembles.

Now the EURO EPS ensembles.

The operational model of the GFS (far from accurate out 16 days) points to accumulations like this across the state of Iowa. Don't put much faith in this but I wanted to show you to point out the potential in the pattern.

After today's storm we'll get a couple days where conditions are largely dry before 2 (perhaps 3), potential snow systems cross the Midwest between now and Monday. I'll be working on the details in coming posts.

Until then we have some big-time mid-winter cold to deal with Wednesday. Look at the temperatures at 7am on the high-res HRRR.

The 7am wind chills. Holy cow, 10 below in NC Iowa.

That's enough bad news for now as winter keeps on giving. Stay positive and roll weather...TS