Still Some Ice Possible and Another Arctic Attack?

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It's your lucky day!  You not only get a detailed written post, but a video as well.  LOL.  I actually needed a way to break up two important items I want to discuss with the forecast.  This written post will deal with the possibility for a wintry mix Monday and Tuesday, especially for the southeastern half of the state.  The video post will deal with model differences next Thursday and Friday.  That's the system I'm still NOT writing off yet and that's explained in the video.

What a difference a day makes huh?  From 74 Saturday afternoon to temperatures holding in the upper 30s Sunday morning with rain!  Wind chill values are in the teens up north with areas of light sleet and freezing rain.  The battle was waged in the atmosphere late Saturday and winter won.  The good news, as we thought, the severe potential was indeed low and at this time, I still have not heard of any tornado damage.  The National Weather Service survey team will examine a few areas in Polk and Montgomery counties where radar did show strong rotation.  However, if something did touch down, it was likely in a remote forested area.  I'll let you know if they find anything and I'll post it on facebook and twitter.

Here are the model maps below from the North American Model (NAM)

This is noon Monday from the Sunday morning run of the NAM.  Look at the precipitation surging back into southeast Arkansas and maybe as far north as Little Rock and Pine Bluff.  That blue dashed line is up north making this very difficult to get snow so we look at surface temperatures to see what's going there.  Scroll down.

Well what do we have here!?  The freezing line at the surface encompasses all of the eastern half of the state.  So any precipitation would fall in the form of sleet/freezing rain.  I want to stress here that if this occurs, it will NOT be a major storm.  At this time, it looks like ONLY light amounts.  If that changes, I'll let you know.  Remember though, it doesn't take much ice to cause travel problems.

Now onto Tuesday at 3PM, there's still a little light precip across far southeastern Arkansas.  Still not snow because the cold air is not deep enough to support that.  You can see that by the location of the "540 line" (blue dashed line) across northwest Arkansas.  So let's look at surface temperatures at the same time.

At this time, the NAM is forecasting temperatures to stay ABOVE freezing.  So this would be a cold rain.  I'll continue to monitor it for you.

Now it's time for the video discussion dealing with a possible late week system and a bigger intrusion of arctic air even further into the long range.