Thanksgiving Potentially Significant Storm System

Model guidance is now hinting at this Thanksgiving storm system to impact the Central and East US.

PSU

Beginning with the ECMWF model, with this forecast going out to 10 days, we see a deep trough pushing into the Southern Plains, neutrally-tilted, as the isobars pushing due south show. Note how pressure tendencies have rotated to the southeast corner of the vort max, likely telling us that this trough will start its maturing phase into a negatively-tilted trough in the next few days, if this model forecast were to go out further. A better description of tilted troughs is below from theweatherprediction.com .

The Weather Prediction

Given the freezing line / 540 thickness line in the top-right image being pulled all the way to the Southern Plains on that ECMWF graphic, as well as the expected negative tilt to this trough, the going ECMWF forecast would likey deliver severe weather to the Southeast, as well as some snow to those in the Great Lakes and southern Midwest, with exact areas to be determined.

Tropical Tidbits

Moving ahead to the GFS-Parallel forecast for the same November 24th timeframe as that ECMWF graphic, we see a very similar forecast. Once again, a strong trough is located in the Southern Plains, as shown by the deep negative height anomalies centered over Texas. If you guessed this trough was neutrally-tilted, you are correct! The height contours seem to be 'pushing' due south, which means it's neither positive or negatively-tilted. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the jet stream forecast for this timeframe from the GFS-Parallel model, which means we cannot tell if this trough is preparing to tilt negatively or not.

We don't have much to work with right now, since the storm's still about 10 days away, so here's a few graphics of precipitation forecasts from the GFS and GFS-Parallel model with this storm.

Tropical Tidbits

Tropical Tidbits

Andrew