Jan. 7—In a social media meme for the weather in Kansas and Missouri, a weather forecaster on television says a winter storm could bring anywhere from 0 to 85 inches of snow.
While the edges are not that extreme, the current forecast from the National Weather Service office in Springfield says the Joplin area is looking at a weather system moving in Thursday and Friday that could bring 5 inches of snow — or no snow.
Ben Price, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Springfield, said it all depends on where the storm tracks.
“There’s still a lot of spread in the models right now,” Price said early Tuesday afternoon. “If we look at like all the models, your low end is zero inches and your high end is looking like 2 to 5 inches of snow for Joplin. Right now, Joplin has about a 20 to 30% chance of greater than 2 inches of snow from the system, so it’s still a pretty low chance of greater than than 2 inches of snow.”
Price said the storm will move south across the western U.S. into Mexico, then back north across Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi.
He said the forecast is pretty firm that the farther south a person goes, the more snow they will see, but the uncertainty is how far north that snow line will reach.
“If we do get any snow up this far north, it would mainly be widespread light snow with maybe some pockets of localized higher amounts,” Price said. “That would probably be where you’re higher and 2 to 5 inches comes from, if one of those bands set up over over your area. But right now, there’s still a lot of uncertainty as per usual.”
He said unlike last weekend’s storm, there doesn’t seem to be any rain coming to places that don’t get snow.
Any snow that falls will happen Thursday afternoon and evening, and temperatures will moderate a little bit from highs in the 20s and lows in single digits through Wednesday to highs in the 30s and lows in the teens after Thursday.
Thursday will be windy, while Friday and the weekend will see sunny to mostly sunny skies.