Noise

More Mid-south woe

The low moved across the Gulf states and produced several inches of snow from southern Arkansas through northern Mississippi. Memphis dodged this one by a couple of dozen miles. The airport got less than an inch and for once Tipton County did not even get a flurry. From here the precipitation hit the Carolinas and southern Virginia hard, but this will be gone Thursday afternoon. 

The graphic, stolen from the Memphis NWS site, shows the futility of forecasting snowfall amounts. A dusting landed on the patio grill cover, the airport got about an inch or so, and then half a foot fell two counties deep into Mississippi. 

Many forecasters inserted flurries into the forecast for Thursday afternoon, based largely on the high-res models. I never bought it because of what was actually going on upstream in Missouri and Illinois. The echoes the models advected across hillbilly heaven from southern Illinois did not exist in reality at mid-morning, and there was time for the equations to spin something up. So far, meteorology 1, modelology 0.