Snow?

As Cody Matz, our morning meteorologist, mentioned in his post (below this one), we are looking at some pretty cold air making its way into the area. That is our entire weather team's main focus as far as the forecast - how much cold air and when will it arrive and start affecting our precipitation type. If things get as cold as they look like they could go - we might end up getting some of our first snowfall of the season - particularly of concern would be the area of south-central South Dakota stretching north toward Chamberlain. Look at this image below, which is temperatures of the air about 5,000 feet up or so.

Those darker shades of blue represent temperatures about 4-8 degrees below zero celsius, and just below freezing the freezing mark in farenheit temperatures. Either way - it will be cold! If you look at the area in eastern Nebraska you will notice a lot of circles. Those are lines of constant pressure known as "isobars" in the world of weather, and when they are aligned like that the system becomes "cutoff" from the main flow of the atmosphere. That allows this system to continue drawing in colder air and spewing rain and even some snow for a period of at least hours or up to days. Eventually another system latches onto the "cutoff low" and pulls it away.

That is important because of this image now, forecasted liquid water amounts:

Think of that image as "future radar" and you can see the coldest air coincides with higher rainfall amounts. Scary stuff. We'll keep you updated on the latest!