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Forecast: Mixed mess with unpleasantness

Photo

Photo by Dan Lassiter

Clint Yahnke blows snow in his driveway on Cornelia St. in Janesville.

JANESVILLE — “Oh, the weather outside is frightful….”

Frightful hardly covers it.

For the next three days, the weather will be indescribable.

Go ahead, read the forecast. Then spend an hour or two with a thesaurus looking for an adjective that captures the ridiculous mess that’s coming our way.

Here’s the breakdown, according to the National Weather Service in Sullivan:

Today—Colicky with a good chance of irritation: Snow will transition into freezing rain in the afternoon and evening.

Tonight into Thursday morning—Unruly evolving into perilous: Freezing rain and sleet changing to snow. Expect sleet and snow accumulations of 2 to 4 inches.

Thursday—Pugnacious in the morning, vindictive from early afternoon to evening: Snow will transition into sleet and rain in the later afternoon. Expect up to one-half inch of ice accumulations.

Thursday late evening—Foul: Rain and sleet.

Friday—Mixed bag of annoying and wearisome: Rain in the a.m. and snow in the afternoon.

That’s not a weather forecast; that’s a revolving door of precipitation.

Chris Franks, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sullivan, acknowledged that our weather typically runs in solid patterns.

Classic winter patterns include colder than all get-out for five to seven days, or three to four days of snow, slight pause, snow, slight pause, snow, back injury from shoveling.

“In this case, we’re right on the line,” Franks said. “The weather is going to be right around freezing.”

North and west of us, forecasters are calling for substantial amounts of snow and high winds, Franks said.

South and east of us, they’ll get cold rain and sleet.

In other words, we’re getting the worst of both worlds.

On the positive side, almost everyone has Friday off, and many folks have both Thursday and Friday off.

In the slightly altered words of the great lyricist Sammy Cahn, “So as long as we’ve no place to go, let it snow, let it sleet, let it rain, let it snow.”