Off A Little...

I checked my voicemail this evening and I had twelve messages. I was a little surprised that I did not have more considering we had sleet, snow, and freezing rain today. To my surprise, none of them were mean or negative! It made me very happy to call Region 8 home! :)

Now, let me first say that the forecast was off a little, but it was not a completely busted forecast. Last week, the data hinted at the chance of Wintry Weather for Today. In fact here is a blog post that I typed up LAST Wednesday:

Blog post from January 9th.

In that blog post, I mentioned that we could have Sleet or Ice today. As time went on, it started to look like the storm would barely clip us to the South. Even this morning, the NWS only had 4 counties in Region 8 under a Winter Weather Advisory and they are the 4 most southeast counties in our viewing area.

Once the sleet started to cover the streets in Little Rock around 9:30 am, I started to get concerned. Even though we had relatively dry air in place across Region 8, the precipitation continued its northward push. As I mentioned at the 5:00 Newscast, sometimes we forecast...and God laughs. I can humbly say that on behalf of the team, we're sorry if the sleet and snow caught you off guard today.

In recent years, we have had a great record on forecasting winter weather and severe weather. There will be times when we miss the forecast and I feel this was one of those times.

Back on the horse now! This stuff will melt away tomorrow and  we'll learn from this little wintry event and be more prepared next time.

Have a good night,
Ryan