Happy winter solstice; big rains still on track

With the winter solstice arriving tomorrow, the winter season will "officially" begin. Of course, Old Man Winter has already been here, regardless of what the calendar shows.

We've got six more weeks of potential winter storms until we reach Groundhog Day, and since the Pennsylvania groundhog is a totally untrustworthy varmint, we might as well add another six more weeks of winter to that. Joy!

On the plus side, the solstice marks the day with the least amount of daylight, so everything from here is an improvement.

There is a wrinkle, however. I've always assumed that the solstice is the turning point when the sun starts setting later in the evening.

That's actually not quite true: according to sunrise/sunset tables, the turning point already came around December 6. On that day, the sun set at 4:40 PM CST at Cape Girardeau. On the solstice, sunset will come a few minutes later, at 4:44 PM. So we're already seeing some improvement.

The catch is that we will continue to lose ground in the morning through the first week of the new year. On January 6, sunrise won't occur until 7:13 AM (by comparison, today's sunrise happened at 7:08 AM).

It's only later in January that the sun will finally start to rise earlier in the morning.

We're still on track for quite a quagmire tonight and tomorrow, with 3-5 inches of liquid rain still forecast. The computer models refuse to budge, continuing to paint the axis of heaviest precipitation right over our heads.

Severe thunderstorms are still in play, although we're right at the edge of the Slight Risk zone. On this map, Slight Risk is painted in yellow, where we have a 15% chance of experiencing severe storms within 25 miles.

We are very close to the red zone (30% chance) and the purple zone (45% chance, or a Moderate Risk). On the other hand, we're also not far from the "We Get Squat Not That We're Complaining" region depicted in white.