Flurry 'Vortex' 2014

Forecast chance of snow early Thursday at 3%

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – We're on 'Flurry Vortex Watch" here at WJXT has Jack Frost's icy grip clings hold of our area for the second time in two weeks.

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You heard it here first, folks! We're looking for snowflake. No, not that snowflake, the bottlenose dolphin or Tursiops truncates, with its elongated beak, round cone shaped teeth and a serrated dorsal appendage. No, we're talking about the white thingy that often usually floats down from the sky in far away places like Chicago, New York -- or Waycross, on occasion.

A series of cold fronts are lined up to come through Jacksonville; with the second scheduled for tonight. If computer models are accurate, which in this case I don't think they are, there might be a snowflake or three that falls in our interior locations along I-75. However, this is an exceedingly small chance.

If the flurries start flying, they would occur during the wee morning hours of Thursday between midnight and 3am. If they don't happen by then, -just wait longer!

I must caution you that it is very likely that the cold air will not arrive fast enough before the atmosphere dries out. 

Snowfall happens in Florida. In fact, it has been reported as far south as Homestead, Fla., where in January 1977, it knocked Carter's inauguration off the front page of the Miami Herald with the word 'Snow' in a font size normally reserved for declarations of war. However, snow at these latitudes is very, very rare and I hate to get people's hopes up.

As you can see in the blue box above, the GFS MOS guidance as we call it shows "S" labeled at the bottom. This model is indicating that there perhaps will be a very small window of change over before the atmosphere dries out.

Look carefully though. At the top of the box I have circled the temperatures. They are very warm with it indicating us cooling from 45 degrees to 39 degrees. If the atmosphere above 10 meters is below freezing, it is possible that flurries could survive in the shallow warm layer near the surface -- at least enough to see a flake.

However, if Lloyd Christmas has anything to say about it -- say it with me -- "So you're telling me there's a chance."

By the way, no accumulations are expected.