Wednesday, Jan.21, 2026 6P.M.

The season’s coldest air mass, so far, will drop over most of the eastern half of the Autocracy of the U.S. in time for the weekend. A cold air mass of this intensity tends to cause any large storm systems to head southward to move around the cold air. Not this time.

About a week ago, computer forecast models started predicting a small pack of energy to “cut off” from the main upper air flow. At that time, the models projected the cut-off to drift into southern California/Arizonia, then head ENE over the southern U.S. This rather weak system would drift over the southern states and create a large area of some snow, but, mostly a major ice storm from northern Texas to North Carolina and out to sea.

By Monday, there was a large difference in models. The GFS, the prime US model, followed the scenario described above. But other models were predicting the eventual path of the cut-off to be hundreds of miles farther north.

And that’s the way it’s going to turn out. That change will create a much larger area of snow centered over northern Tennessee and Kentucky. The sleet/freezing rain storm remains south of the snow.

It’s still too early to determine the exact path of the storm and the amounts of snow and ice. But, for now, the GFS predicts 6″ – 8″ for the Louisville area while the consensus model goes 8″-12″.

It’s going to be very cold during the snowstorm, so we’ll have a very dry, fluffy snow and it’ll be hard to measure due to a lot of drifting.