Well, Nome is constantly throwing curveballs at
us, but it’s Alaska, right? It seems like the outlier GFS is at least partially
right for never bringing the warm sector into Nome (still 25F), with easterly
surface winds just having flipped to northerly and not as strong as expected,
not much stronger than yesterday. The low-level cold air that’s entrenched is
preventing strong winds from mixing down from aloft effectively. Snow fell
heavily for longer than expected and despite potential precipitation undercatch
with snow and wind, the station still recorded 0.61” of precip. The warm, moist
Pacific air ramming into an extremely cold Alaskan air mass, in addition to
slight upslope enhancement (southeast winds just aloft ramming into mountains
just to the north) really does wonders in producing ascent and precipitation.
The snow and associated sublimational cooling at the start led to a morning low
of 17F, but it remains to be seen if it will get lower than that by 06z
tonight. The wind direction change could still cause more vertical mixing and a
brief temperature spike, albeit less than earlier thought with the low-level
cold air mostly winning out. Partly cloudy skies with light winds should lead
to decent radiational cooling tonight, especially with the fresh snow cover.
With the radiational cooling but low-level moisture leftover from the snowstorm
and no strong advection of dry air at the low-levels, freezing fog and
low-level clouds will form, and combined with easterly winds and warm advection
returning later in the day, it will warm up, leading to the high at Friday 06z.
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