When the weather is a lot like vegetable soup!

To me a good vegetable soup (one that's homemade) is always a surprise mainly because you never know what’s going to be in it. A lot depends on the chef’s whim not to mention what might be on hand. Well, the weather for this coming Wednesday night through Thursday time frame is something like that soup. Much will depend on what ‘ingredients’ show up for the party of in this case winter storm.

I’d have to agree with one forecaster who mentioned that much of what we will get will depend on the temperature profile for today. The warmer it gets before nightfall, the longer it will take for frozen precipitation to develop. Having said that, another fly in the ‘soup’ will be what happens at the various levels of the atmosphere as a predicted cold front pushes into, and under a colder dome of air that was already in place. As the picture above indicates, it then becomes possible for any snow that’s generated to then fall into slightly warmer air where the flakes just barely melt but are still very cold. Then when these super-chilled rain drops enter another level of cold air just above the surface, the drops can flash freeze on any surface they come into contact with. Voila – an ice storm is born…or not – it’s all about the timing.

So, when I’m looking at the system that is currently over to mountains and am thinking about what kind of soup we will be having, I tend to go with the vegetable variety or a little bit of everything!