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Yesterday’s flakes definitely weren’t what we want. But boy do I have something that will satisfy even the most ravenous snow geese on tap for the weekend!

The impending arctic outbreak over North America has been well-advertised in the long-range numerical guidance for a couple of weeks. Now the likelihood of a major southern snowstorm is all but locked in. The pattern itself is a beautiful setup, and at this juncture basically all the models agree there is a big storm on the way for a large swath of the southern and eastern US. In fact, NC hasn’t seen as great of a setup as this in many, many years. There’s a lot to be excited about.

The timing of the storm is still up for debate, but for now our impacts look to begin overnight Friday, through Saturday and possibly into Sunday AM. The setup is a classic southern-tracking storm that begins in Texas and slides east through the Deep South as it makes its way to NC and possibly the Mid-Atlantic. An arctic airmass arrives behind a cold front that moves through Friday. The moisture arrives shortly after from the west, producing widespread snow, sleet, and freezing rain for much of northern GA, and all of SC, NC, and VA. This will be a strong storm with a lot of available moisture. And since the cold air will be copious, a majority of the precipitation will be something frozen for a large chunk of US real estate.

There is widespread support among the operational deterministic runs, the ensembles, and the AI models. In fact, for a storm several days out, this type of consensus is quite rare. For instance, all but one of the 50 members of the ECWMF ensemble suite has measurable snow at RDU. About 15 of the members print greater than a foot, leaving the ensemble mean around 7″. That’s impressive, and that’s just one modeling suite. All the other majors are in line with this thinking. Of course they have their own variability in timing and p-type distributions, but the generalities are the same.

The other encouraging factor is the good run-to-run consistency. This is not one of those storms the models show in the morning runs only to disappear in the evening runs. We are getting tremendous consistency.

At this point, I personally am making contingency plans for the weekend with the expectation of major disruptions to normal schedules. And yes, there’s still plenty of time to watch, so at this point they are just contingencies. But over the next couple days, you’ll see winter storm watches and advisories go up first in Texas and then spread east to us here in NC.

One other point to make… assuming we do a get several inches of snow, this would be a setup where with even more cold air filtering in behind the storm and a fresh snow pack, we will see morning lows drop to single digits, possibly even close to 0.

What could go wrong? One big thing to be fearful of with these situations is the cold air pushing too far south such that the storm track is suppressed. In those cases, it’s just damn cold and your friends even farther south get the good stuff, leaving us dry and cold with a flurry or two. I’m sure the storm track will vacillate north and south in the models over the next couple days until we focus in the exact track which will inform the distribution of snow to sleet to freezing rain.

This far out, it’s important to not hone in on specifics. Just know that this time around… these are the droids you’re looking for, and they’ll be covered in snow and ice!