Weather! Snow News Like Good News

Some quick thoughts on our snowfall chances for this afternoon and overnight into tomorrow morning. It’s going to start as rain, and it’s going to end as rain. What happens in the middle, however, is slightly harder to figure out. Surface temperatures are likely not going to dip below freezing much, if at all, which […]

March 2, 2010; 10:23 AM • by Weather Dan

Some quick thoughts on our snowfall chances for this afternoon and overnight into tomorrow morning.

It’s going to start as rain, and it’s going to end as rain. What happens in the middle, however, is slightly harder to figure out. Surface temperatures are likely not going to dip below freezing much, if at all, which means that anything non-liquid that falls is going to be either:

• a) mixed with rain,
• b) very, very wet, heavy snow,
• or c) all of the above.

The warm temperatures and rain are going to guarantee that the roads are slushy at worst, and anything that falls will likely only accumulate on grass and cars. The biggest question is going to be about storm track. If the surface low that’s the catalyst for all this shifts by 25-50 miles, then the areas that will see the bands of heaviest precipitation will change.

The precipitation shield from this system extends far in advance of it. It’s currently snowing in Atlanta, and is forecast to begin this afternoon in Charlotte. There are radar returns over Virginia right now, but this moisture is not hitting the ground. We won’t begin to see anything falling until the upper layers of the atmosphere are saturated with water, so I wouldn’t expect that to happen until later this afternoon at the earliest. Tonight’s commute may be a bit waterlogged.

As far as snowfall amounts go, I’m going with “not much.” IF we see some of the heavy snow bands, we might see something measurable up to about 2”, but that’s a huge “if.” There are a lot of variables to this storm that we just won’t know about until it gets here.

Edit: On an unrelated note, for those of you who heard sirens this morning in the vicinity of Monroe Park and MCV, VCU was conducting its annual tornado drill.

Gov. McDonnell has declared that March 16 will be Tornado Preparedness Day in Virginia. A tornado drill alert will be sounded statewide at 9:45 that morning to allow schools, businesses and other organizations to test emergency systems and practice emergency preparedness plans.

March 2, 2010 10:23 AM 5