Anyone else preparing for the big storm?
 

I'm in KC and people are peeling out of work like crazy right now. Supposed to drop below freezing later this afternoon and turn this rain into freezing rain and snow. Sounds like fun!

That storm is supposed to hit us over night Thursday/Friday. I am looking forward to giving the 4-wheel drive a go in the snow!

We're supposed to get some sleet (or at least some "wintery mix") tomorrow morning. I'm rather pumped about it, though it's gonna make my five minute drive to work a little more treacherous that usual.

We're hoping for a bit of snow in Lexington Thursday night into Friday. At least, my family is. We missed the first snow the Sunday before Thanksgiving because we were in Texas, and my kids have rarely seen snow (and certainly not at their house!).

WOOT! First winter storm!!! Time to break out the Hot Dr Pepper!!!

Yeah, it's like 60 degrees here and 35 there. :)

It's coming our way, supposed to start in the AM tomorrow.

Yesterday was absolutely gorgeous. I was walking around KC and Lawrence in shorts and sandalls and it got up to at least 70.

Today, it's just now hit Lawrence in the last hour so KC is in the next hour or two. I went to my bank at about 12 and it was lightly raining but came out about half an hour later and buckets of sleet were coming down.

So, if you work in KC, I would definitely recommend leaving in the next hour or so if you can since you know what the city looks like when ice hits.

SI

You better hope it's snow and not ice. Four wheels or ten, you're not going anywhere if it's an ice storm. :)

indeed. You know how to tell appart regular 2 wheel drive cars and 4 wheel drive cars? 4 wheel drive cars usually end up about 20 feet deeper in trouble when the shit hits the fan. :D

FM

Q: what is th difference between a 2 and 4 wheel drive pickup?
A: How far you have to walk.

And, just like that, it's pretty much stopped here (actually stopped about half an hour ago). So, we got that much sleet in less than an hour.

SI

They said we may get some in Little Rock, but there is no way it will stick.

I definitely won't do anything crazy. Having this truck will prevent me from having to shovel the driveway, hopefully. I'll park on the wife's side of the driveway hoping there's not much snow build up. Then I can just park my truck in the snow on my side.

Yes. I am lazy. I hate shoveling snow.

What, you mean the storm running through Denver now?

Ugh, I HATE snow. hate it, hate it, hate it. Having to sweep off six inches off the car this morning pissed me off. Having to do it again before I leave for work tonight makes me even more unhappy.

When I lived in the suburbs and had my Jeep I helped a neighbor "shovel her driveway" by driving up and down it half a dozen times and creating a packed down tread path for her to drive through. :)

hint: move from denver colorado

We're bracing for it all the way down here in Dallas, too. We are pretty much spanning the gamut with weather conditions:

Today: 80 degrees, not a cloud in the sky
Tonight: Hail and T-Storms and Tornados
Later Tonight: 25 degrees
Tomorrow: 35 degrees and wintry mix

In Lexington, the forecast is for severe thunderstorms/hail/possible tornadoes Thursday night, then by 10-11am Friday morning, the cold front comes through, drops temps about 25-30 degrees, and turns the rain to snow. And I'm actually looking forward to it (except the possible severe weather). You can tell I'm a snow noob.

yea, my neighborhood is iced down completely.. hooray for not going to work

Yeah, I'm feeling kindof good right now about my twin decisions of taking this week off and getting everything I needed outside of my apartment done by just after noon on Wednesday.

SI

I wonder if the potential severe weather will make for some entertaining viewing tomorrow night of the Ravens/Bengals game.

I managed to get out of work about an hour early and my 35-minute drive home took me about 1:15 plus 10 minutes of clearing my car off. I'm somewhat surprised we haven't had more problems with ice on trees and power lines yet.

Part II of the storm is supposed to blow in overnight with a band just south of KC getting about a foot of snow. Of course, this storm is continuing to track north and that band could move into the metro. Lovely.

Hopefully it stays just south and east enough that Lawrence gets missed, as per usual.

SI

It was a freezing 55 degrees this morning in Phoenix. I was really worried about the roads.

Brought my laptop home just in case. ;)

You're probably talking about the thunderstorm for the game, but I am thinking of a different angle. The Bengals are my team and I am caught in quite a quandry here in St. Louis if the weather forecast holds up. It isn't supposed to get bad until around noon tomorrow so I will be heading to work in the morning, but my parents live like 2 minutes from my work while I live a long way (especially in severe weather). Unfortunatly, I get the NFL network with directv and they don't with Charter cable. Do I drive in potentially severe weather for a game or not mess with it? Will an ice storm end up screwing with Directv coverage anyways?

Right now.. 1-2 inches tomorrow afternoon and 6-10 tomorrow night..

Well down here in the Armpit of the US, its supposed to be 65 when I leave for work in the morning and 35 when I leave work. Thats friggin' cold for us down here.

That's what it's looking like here too, we're just a half day ahead of you. I've got about 1-2 inches of sleet/ice/snow on the ground right now, but it's pretty much tapered off for now. Round two is supposed to start tomorrow afternoon, with at least one usually wrong forecaster calling for 6-12+ in the metro by Friday morning.

Whio, pray tell, is that?

SI

Gary Lezak at KSHB. It's in his blog right now: "We are forecasting 6 to 12 inches in Kansas City with over a foot in some spots possible."

Of course, Gary's famous for changing his forecast repeatedly so later he can always say he was right.

Scheduled to roll in through here tomorrow through Friday. Starts off as rain tonight into tomorrow with temps in the low 50s before dropping off tomorrow afternoon. Everything goes into the tank starting tomorrow night into Friday with all sorts of nastiness coming down. Metro Detroit looks like it'll get a glancing blow out of this with 3-5 inches of snow, but just north and west of here, they've posted Winter Storm Watches for a potential 5-8 inch accumulation. Of course, if the forecast is wrong by some distance, we could get dumped on anyway....

That's what I figured. He's more for entertainment value as I think, like most at that station, he plays up the dramatic. Unlike most at that station, tho, I think he really believes it. I remember one time, there were some "suspicious looking clouds" over KC from a storm that had previously spawned a tornado and he wanted so badly to see them forming something again but there was just nothing there. Passionate guy, just lets a little weather fanboyism get in the way of accuracy.

I actually saw his report at 5pm and he actually said 6-12" would be down south and east of KC, possibly reaching Lee's Summit if everything breaks right for the "worst case". But he also said north and west may get very little- just an inch or two.

He has also predicted single digit lows and no one else is getting even close to that, almost everyone in the mid teens.

SI

Bring it on!

SI - Jack is freaking out right now, wants everyone at work at 7am to make sure calls are caught up. :)

I suppose that's the nice thing about us doing mostly the per-event stuff in KC. Ultimately, those could always be put off or returned if necessary but not so with the crazy 1 hour calls and the like.

Speaking of which, I keep trying to access webmail and am having no luck. Oh well, I'll just email out the FSRs tomorrow. It's not like those have ever been on a tight schedule as there always seem to be month old ones on the report.

SI

Hey SI, quit wishing that it goes south and east of Lawrence...that's where I am!! The roads out here in the country (about 45 minutes south of Olathe) are all iced up and there were plenty of accidents this afternoon. More snow would be fine. More ice....not so much.

Where at down there? I've probably had to go out that direction before.

And when I mean south and east, I'm talking about SE of KC, down in that part of Missouri where there aren't a whole lot of people except along 50.

That said, I'd never wish ice on anyone. I fear driving on the stuff :(

SI

Yeah.. it's just Jack doing what he always likes to do, overreact. I don't have any calls due tomorrow at Verizon, so I guess I'll sleep in. :D

Jeez, Troy, you call yourself a Coloradoan? I definitely prefer this weather than the relatively hot shit we get in the summer.

We got about 6-9" here, much more in the mountains though - 2-3 feet. It came with an arctic blast so it's going to be a little on the cool side, about 0 tonight.

I'd like to see some snow. We're supposed to get 1-2" overnight, and another couple on Friday. Enough to make the ground slippery but not enough to enjoy. :(

There are currently tornado watches immediately west of San Antonio, and the storms are moving to the northeast. That means they should be reaching me in about 2 to 3 hours. Which is strange, because I figured with an arctic front moving through that the winds would be out of the north.

I am about 20 miles east of Ottawa and 45 miles south of Olathe in Miami County. That means the sand trucks should hit our roads sometime on Friday...of next week.

So somewhere like Paola or further south like down by La Cygne Lake?

SI

Just a little south of Paola (10 miles). West of Osawatomie. Not quite down in the budding metropolis that is the LaCygne area. They just outlawed golfcarts as street legal transportation down there (true story).

Can't say I've been exactly where you are talking about but I've been down to Paola a couple of times and taken 69 as far south as Fort Scott.

SI

Osawatomie is 10 miles south of Paola on 169. According to KMBC our area should see 4-8 inches tomorrow starting at noonish or so. But it does look like you were right about it missing Lawrence. The good news is that it looks like all snow and no ice.

Ah, see I'd like a few inches of snow in Lawrence. I still very much have that Texan "oh cool! it's snowing" mentality. I'm just not too keen of packing it on top of the inch of ice we have everywhere.

SI

The winner is still Katie Horner for the time she came into the studio during a tornado warning wearing jeans and in a ponytail because she had been gardening, then telling everyone in the warning area to take shelter in their basement or lower level bathroom and put on a football helmet if they have one.

True story.

It's nothing like what you all deal with, but we are in the middle of some very extreme weather here for California.

Gale force (50-60 mph) winds have been tearing up the Inland Empire (Riverside/San Berdoo area) and deserts today, and even here deep in OC, the windows are rattling.

I work out in IE, so I got to feel that first hand. Literally, swirling dust and debris flying through the air. Me seriously wondering if we're going to get hit by a tornado. Trees falling, power going out, the whole gamuk.

It might be a normal thing for you guys in the Midwest or in the hurricane zones, but for us, it is new and weird (and for some, frightening).

Oh crap. They just adjusted the storm track towards the north. KC's going to get hammered, especially on the south side. Up to a foot on the north side of town with the south side of town getting 20-24" of snow. That's a ton of snow. Guess I'll be heading out of town early to avoid the snow and go to the Mizzou/Arkansas game. Columbia is now expecting only a trace of snow, so they'll certainly play the game tomorrow. 4x4 trucks rock.