Rapid Warming over Fairbanks

There will be much more to come, but here's a quick post with the temperature plots from the upper air soundings from the Fairbanks Airport on Wednesday. Happily, there was an extra release at 9am:

As you can plainly see, there was no above freezing layer at all: even at 3pm the entire sounding was still below freezing. Notice the lowering "lid" of the warm air during the day. The freezing rain early Wednesday morning was perhaps the result of the deep layer with temperatures -4 to -7C, a prime set-up for super-cooled water droplet formation. The cloud tops were cold enough (-15C or so) to support ice crystal growth, but my speculation is that there was not enough upward vertical motion to support much crystal growth. Once that process started, then the freezing drizzle turned to snow and produced 2-4 inches around the area by 3pm.