A few flakes today, more snow this weekend

DETROIT – As expected, the snow on Thursday evening has been largely insignificant in the entire area.

Many of us have seen no more than a gust, while a few may have been very lightly dusted – especially near and north of I-69.

Once these light flakes have dissipated, the rest of our last Friday should be, as Brandon likes to call it, mostly cloudy, with peaks reaching perhaps the mid-20s (-5 degrees Celsius). The wind is blowing from the northeast at a speed of 5 to 10 mph.

Today’s sunrise is at 7:33 AM and today’s sunset is at 6:02 PM

Friday night mostly cloudy, with mid-teens lows (-9 degrees Celsius). For some of us, light snow will form, especially in the south, late at night.

Light snow is likely on Saturday and will continue until Saturday evening. This will continue to look like a 1- to 2-inch snowfallSaturday highs in the low 20s (-6 degrees Celsius), and Saturday night lows back to the single digits (-13 degrees Celsius).

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Partly cloudy to start on Sunday, and then will be mostly cloudy. Heights in the higher teens (-8 to -7 degrees Celsius).

The core of this current Arctic wave arrives Sunday evening and Monday, with Sunday night lows well into the single digits (-16 degrees Celsius), and peaks on Monday only in the mid-teens (-9 degrees Celsius). There may be some light snow on Monday.

The models strongly disagree about Tuesday’s storm. They agree that we will get snow, but strongly disagree about where the low pressure area on the surface will be, and that makes a big difference in how much snow we get. The GFS model gives us maybe 8 cm of snow, while the ECMWF gives us 4 to 8 inches.

We are not getting snow amounts from the UKMET model, but the surface pattern is more like that of the ECMWF. Meanwhile, the GEM is nothing like the other three, so I’m not discounting it. So plan some now Tuesday seriously, though details won’t become more certain until later this weekend.

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As for Thursday’s storm, disagreements over models are even greater. The ECMWF misses us almost completely, while the GFS plows us with another heavy snowfall.

The bottom line is that the pattern change we’ll see next week will be one of the bigger storms to hit the eastern US, unlike the weaker systems we’ve seen lately. Stay tuned!