1. No travel impacts Wednesday through Saturday with dry weather.
2. Minor travel impacts late Saturday night into Sunday with a 40-70% chance of light rain showers. Impacts limited to wet roadways for motorists.
3. Temperatures below to near normal over the next 7 days.
A dry and cool airmass associated with surface high pressure in the Plains will produce no weather-related travel impacts tonight through Thanksgiving. Light surface winds will gradually shift to the south Thursday morning and then to the northeast late Thursday
ahead of a digging upper trough in the Central Rockies. Skies will be clear tonight with lows falling to the upper 20s and lower 30s. Surface winds look to provide sufficient mixing and temperature and dewpoint spreads are large enough to limit any fog
development to patchy coverage and focused near lakes and larger river valleys. High temperatures on Thanksgiving will range from the mid 50s in central Missouri to near 60 degrees in southern Missouri. Thanksgiving will start off with sunny skies with an increase in high level clouds in central Missouri during the afternoon.
Minor travel impacts late Saturday night into Sunday from wet roadways. Model runs continue to dig upper trough in the Central Rockies and eject open wave into the Central Plains Saturday night and Sunday. Moisture return ahead of this system in the Ozarks will be minimal with precipitable water values ranging from 0.5-0.75". Cloud cover will increase Saturday with skies becoming cloudy by mid afternoon. Widespread precipitation will develop in western and central Kansas and western and central
Oklahoma Saturday aided by upper level diffluence and vorticity advection. Precipitation will gradually migrate east with light rain showers spreading into southeast Kansas Saturday night and southwest Missouri late Saturday night into Sunday morning.
Precipitation amounts are likely to be light ranging from 0.1-0.5". Ensemble model guidance solutions show the probability of precipitation greater than 0.1" at 40-80% and the probability of precipitation greater than 0.5" at 10-20%.
No Winter precipitation impacts are expected in our forecast area of Southeast Kansas and Southwest Missouri. Thermal profiles support and ensemble model guidance depicts the highest probabilities of snow greater than 1" in northwest Oklahoma, western, central and northeast Kansas and northwest Missouri with probabilities at 60-100%. The probabilities of snow accumulation greater than 3" are above 70% in south central and western Kansas.
It should be noted that ensemble thermal temperature profile spreads increase in the models over the weekend. A few of the colder solutions (not the majority of solutions) are cold enough to support a brief period of light snow in a few locations. Thus
the reason for some of the deterministic output of a trace to 0.5" of snow at some locations within the forecast area. Forecaster confidence remains high in minor travel impacts Saturday Night into Sunday limited to wet roadways for motorists and lower
ceilings and visibilities for pilots due to initial light rain, warm ground temperatures and late arrival of colder air advecting into the thermal profile.
The precipitation will exit east into the Mississippi Valley by Sunday afternoon. Surface high pressure will build into the Ozarks Sunday with highs in the 40s Sunday and Monday, lows in the 20s and a north wind. Temperatures begin to rebound Tuesday and
Wednesday with the return of southerly flow and a building upper ridge in the Central Rockies.
