Major East Coast Storm

There seems to be little question as to whether this weekend’s major East Coast storm will come to pass.  The questions are where and how much.

It appears likely a good swath of real estate will be measuring snow totals in feet as opposed to inches.  It appears likely this will be a monster storm.  It appears likely many coastal areas north of NC will experience significant beach erosion coinciding with a full moon.  It appears likely gale force winds will be felt over most of the Mid-Atlantic and NE, if not a couple of hurricane force gusts mixed in.  So…it’s likely to be the storm of the year, if not the storm of the past several.  If you have plans to go anywhere north of the NC/VA border this weekend, change them.

For us the questions are how much snow, how much sleet, any freezing rain? and how much rain?

It looks like we’ll should have frozen something on the front end and back end.  But, what about the middle?  Changeover to rain? and for how long and how much QPF goes to that?

Most likely outcome for the Triangle at this point seems to be some frozen at the onset, with changeover to rain for a good portion of the storm, followed by snow at the end.  Indications 4 days out are that we should expect a rather sharp gradient in the haves and have nots.  That is, over a relatively short distance, snow totals should ramp up.  For example, see this projection. (and not to be one of those proliferating NWP snowfall maps…this is to show the gradient)

Screen Shot 2016-01-19 at 12.25.01 AM

You see how quickly we go from 3″ at RDU to 13″ at Roxboro to 30″ in Central VA.  Again, don’t take this as literal.  Just one piece of guidance for real life humans to interpret and come up with their best assessment.

Bottom line, we don’t know yet.  And I imagine we’ll be fine tuning this up to Thursday night.  There will be significant wintry precip in NC.  The mountains are a near lock…east of there we’ll see how it works.

In the meantime, we can expect a round of flurries or a lucky snow shower on Wednesday evening.  The QPF (amount of actual water equivalent) will be very small, but anything that falls should have no trouble sticking around with the antecedent cold temps.  We will monitor it assiduously, as a little snow goes a long way on frozen ground to make for bad driving a la Jan 19th 2005…lo these 10 years ago.

 

 

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