Iowa Weather Report January 27th 2015: It Could Be Worse

TWO WARM DAYS: Some warm and dry days are ahead for the state with readings back into the 40s and 50s for most of the area. The only exception will be the far northeastern counties where upper 30s will be possible with a few more clouds. The rest of the state will see partly to mostly sunny skies around. A system on Wednesday night into Thursday morning could bring some slight snow chances to the northeastern counties of the state but it will bring readings back closer to where readings should be for this time of year.

WEEKEND: The GFS is showing the weekend could bring some significantly more active weather to the area with a system coming in from the south and west merging with a clipper that will be dropping in from the northwest. Current thinking is that any precipitation will start Saturday morning over the western and southwestern counties of the state and move through the rest of the state by the afternoon hours on Saturday. The heaviest precipitation looks to fall during the overnight hours Saturday night into Sunday morning through at least mid-day before beginning to taper off. It’s way too early to determine any amounts at this point as confidence in this is still low at this point. Where our confidence is higher is the cold air that will be coming in behind this system into next week. This will bring readings down into the 20s and lower 30s for highs with lows in the single digits and teens. This will all depend on snow cover, clear skies and light winds on how low readings may get early next week.

EXTENDED PERIOD: The GFS is showing a rather up and down forecast for the extended period with warm and cold spells and several systems that could bring some precipitation to the state at that time. Given the wild swings of what the GFS has shown us over the last few days, we’ll just have to watch for any run to run model trends at this point before having any significant confidence in the model past the initial seven to eight day period.