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The outline for a major Carolina winter storm is coming into better focus.  Finally, the various models are beginning to converge on a unified solution.  Notice I said beginning to…not that they’re there yet.  At issue are perturbations in the southern branch of the jet, their magnitudes and their timing.

Here’s the basic outline.  The arctic front will slip thru NC early tomorrow AM and the colder air will begin to filter in.  There will probably be a couple of snow showers late.  Then the first wave ripples along the front during the day on Tues.  It now appears that most of the associated precip will fall south of the Triangle during the day…south of a line from Greenville to Charlotte to Fayetteville to New Bern in the form of a rain/snow mix to the south, changing to all snow where it precipitates hard enough and on the north of the band where the colder air is.  If there is a shift north with this band, it would bring accumulating snows in earlier than the overnight Tues/Wed timeframe for the real storm. (latest 18Z NAM is hinting at earlier arrival)

Then Wed morning the major system approaches out of the Gulf and rides north along the coast and just offshore.  It appears to be a set up for a formidable storm with high QPF (precip) and extensive winter weather headaches over a large chunk of real estate.  Lots of snow and ice in the South, riding all the way up the Eastern Seaboard.  I like the looks of the 12Z Euro, but haven’t seen it’s ensembles yet.  The 12Z GFS is too far out to sea and whisks the storm away (altho it is now beginning to correct back west).  The 12Z Canadian is, well, very Canadian, eh.  Very snowy and a thumping from SC to Maine with a 961mb low off Cap Cod overnight Thursday.

As I said at the beginning, there are still many questions unanswered and hopefully these next two model run cycles will unify the message.  So, at this point, what does this mean for sensible weather?  It’s a classic NC winter setup with best chances for snow to the north and west and a transition zone to sleet then freezing rain, then all rain at the coast.  Right now it looks like the Triangle will see snow beginning Wed AM, changing to sleet and then possibly to freezing rain.  And you say, “what about accumulations?”  to which I say “that question really isn’t all that important”.  What is important is that there will be a lot of precip.  And the fact that it will all be something wintry is reason enough to say this will be a high impact event.  That’s the bottom line.  It will be a major event for most of the state and beyond.  We’ll fill in details about p-types and quantities over the next couple days.

So…stock up on the essentials: bread, milk, beer…and we’ll watch this evolve.