March 10-12th Heavy Rains & More Flooding concerns.

Early indications are that this storm system during this time could potentially become a high impact event with heavy QPF concerns.

We have been watching this system despite the current storm that is moving into the region and latest 00z models indicate this has the potential to be a slow moving storm. So lets look at the GFS first..

The GFS has a piece of energy that dives southeast from  along the NW coast which sharpens the trough and then in response develops a cut off low due to a huge blocking pattern in the Atlantic. In order for this low to become cut off and slow down as shown it is highly dependent on the blocking depiction of the Atlantic being accurate. Verbatim on the GFS this results in a SIGNIFICANT amount of heavy rain.

The model continues to linger rain even after what you see here above as the totals for 48 hrs thru hr 150.

00z GGEM appears to be slightly faster however..this too still produces what looks to be a fairly significant amount of rain.

00z UKMET seems to be faster then the rest of the above models  but still looks like it would indicate a heavy rain situation.

At the time of this writing the ECM was not available for 00z but the 12 Z also gave an indication of a system with potential to become cut off from the flow but on the 12 Z ECM that cutoff was further to the south.The 12 Z ECM has the blocking across the Atlantic which causes the trough to sharpen similar to the GFS but the ejecting piece of energy on the 12 Z ECM is weaker and it is this piece of energy that creates the cut off on the GFS.

If this system does become cut off as the GFS advertises then the threat for significant rain will be higher. Even without the cut off system it still appears as if this system will produce some heavy rains but of course they would not be as high impact as what the GFS is indicating.

We will continue to monitor this situation..At this time it appears a certainty that there will be another storm system effecting the region providing some heavy rains..but the question that needs to be answered is does it indeed cut off? This blocking and cut off low have implications just a few days later which the next post will talk about.