textproduct: Wichita

KEY MESSAGES

- Mild temperatures expected for the area today

- High confidence for an Arctic Outbreak with extreme cold temperatures/dangerous cold wind chills to impact the entire area Friday-Sunday along with accumulating snowfall affecting mainly southern Kansas

DISCUSSION

Issued at 250 AM CST Wed Jan 21 2026

Another day of mild temperatures will prevail across Kansas today with cooler near normal temperatures for Thursday before the bottom falls out thereafter.

Models remain consistent with the upper pattern showing the Polar Vortex rotating from northern Canada southward into the Great Lakes region by Thursday. This will force a frigid arctic airmass southward across the Dakotas/Nebraska during the day on Thursday. The arctic air will begin to invade Kansas late Thursday night and continue to overspread the entire area on Friday with falling temperatures throughout the day. The arctic air will become well entrenched through the weekend and could extend into Monday with models showing another possible re-enforcing surge of more arctic air arriving Sunday night into Monday. Model probabilities remain high(60-80% chances for Saturday daytime highs of 10F or colder) and (40-50% chances of 10F or colder on Sunday). Any fresh snow cover would only worsen these extreme cold temperatures with this kind of weather setup. In addition, dangerous winds chills of -10F to -20F are likely to occur during the nighttime/morning periods. An extreme cold watch may be needed at some point if models continue to trend even colder, especially with ECMWF EFI index now having pretty much all of it's ensemble members predicting extreme cold event likely to occur for the weekend.

As for snowfall, GFS model has begun to trend further north with it's snowfall projections becoming more in alignment with ECMWF/Canadian models. The dry low layers look to delay the snowfall from reaching the ground initially, but eventually the deeper lift will begin to saturate the vertical column from the mid-levels downward. The snowfall looks to be a fairly long duration event beginning sometime Friday afternoon/evening and continuing through Saturday night. We hoisted a Winter Storm Watch for southern Kansas(Friday afternoon-Saturday night) with those locations having the potential of witnessing snowfall amounts of 3 to 6 inches. We will continue to monitor model trends on the extreme cold temperatures and what locations will be impacted by the higher snow amounts.

AVIATION /12Z TAFS THROUGH 12Z THURSDAY/

Issued at 515 AM CST Wed Jan 21 2026

VFR conditions expected over the next 24hrs with mostly clear skies and westerly winds prevailing during the day. A wind shift will sink southward tonight causing the winds to switch around to the north then an easterly direction.

ICT WATCHES/WARNINGS/ADVISORIES

Winter Storm Watch from Friday afternoon through late Saturday night for KSZ069-082-083-091>094-098>100.