Pittsburgh Weather: Upcoming Winter Storm Proves To Be Forecasting Challenge

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PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- When it comes to weather models, there is no shortage of models taking their shot at what is going to happen.

"There's the American Model [known as] GFS, there's the European model, there's the NAM, the high resolutions models, the Wharf, NAM3, the high resolution rapid refresh model, there are so many models to choose from and they all give you varying answers sometimes," KDKA Meteorologist Ray Petelin said.

Fellow KDKA Meteorologist Ron Smiley says they will watch them all, but there are primarily two that draw their focus.

"The Euro and the GFS. [Right now] the Euro is still a little bit higher than the GFS, more snow. The GFS has warmer air in place during the whole event," Smiley said.

To give you an idea of just how widely these models can be, Thursday afternoon Petelin pulled the Euro prediction for Sunday morning.

"You wake up and this model is saying there will be 17 inches of snow in Pittsburgh," he said.

But then Petelin opened the American model.

"This is saying 2 to 3 inches for Pittsburgh and 11 inches to the north," he said.

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The KDKA Meteorologists point out that the storm is just now coming ashore on the west coast. Up until now, all the readings on the storm have been coming from ocean buoys and satellites.

But now that it's coming over land, Petelin says, "You get upper air observations with weather balloons, you have radar data, satellite data. So there's a lot more that's going to feed into it. So we're gonna get a much better picture as to what is going on with this storm as well."

All of that critical to the models doing their job.

"The model says this, now the model says that. These models bobble around based on the information that is fed into them," Petelin said.

Smiley says the models need all the help they can get.

"Unfortunately for this system, the models do not have a good handle on things and that's one of the reasons why it's been making it tough for us," he said.

Tough because everyone wants to know what they are going to get at their house and the smallest piece of data change, Petelin says, can make a huge difference in this storm.

"Especially in a forecast that only needs 30 miles to go from rain to incredible amounts of snow," he said.

Smiley and Petelin say there's a non-snow factor to this storm that should not be ignored. Smiley says it's ice.

"A lot of ice. We're not just talking about a trace amount of ice, but a lot of ice with freezing rain that's going to be possible, especially in the mountains," he said.

That could mean substantial power outages.

As the hours tick by and the storm sweeps this way, the meteorologists are watching the models slowly come together.

"Certainly Friday, we'll pretty much say this our forecast say this is what we think is going to happen. Then the rest is up to mother nature," Petelin said.

Smiley says he'll spend Saturday monitoring every twist and turn of the storm hoping "that it's doing exactly what I said."

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