Yesterday's featured map showed that the Ice Storm Warning is a rather rare headline issued by the National Weather Service. The main reason why it is rare is that a number of factors need to align and the margin between an event turning to all snow or to all rain is very thin. The featured chart presents a quick analysis of Omaha soundings coincident with reports of freezing rain from the airport weather station. There are caveats galore with a plot like this, but some general characteristics are informative. While the Omaha airport was reporting rain at the time, the profile for Monday evening (3 January in UTC) is included as well for a comparison. The left panel shows the air temperature profiles and right panel shows the height of the maximum temperature. In general, the plot shows the classic warm "nose" aloft that allows falling precipitation to melt to rain and then fall into a shallow layer of air near the surface that is just below freezing. The red line shows the profile last night and it can be seen to be too warm to support freezing the precipitation.

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Tags:   sounding   freezingrain