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 […]
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.
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Weather Dan
Dan Goff is now a two-time former Richmonder, having departed the River City yet again in favor of southwest Virginia, where he is working on degrees in geography and meteorology at Virginia Tech. Have a question about the weather or weather-related phenomena?
Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.
As long as we’re not faced with 10 Inches Of Snow…
I’m hoping for less snow. The less snow the better. Right?
Also: yay for WxDan getting picked up by RVANews! Another great reason to come visiting the site!
I’m tired of wearing a coat and a scarf and gloves and sturdy shoes. I want to wear skirts and flimsy ballet flats and worry about my hair being frizzy, not whether I’m going to have to clean snow off my car, again. I miss the temperature being in the 90s and the humidity suffocating me.
Make it happen, Weather Dan! (please and thank you?)
what are we supposed to do during a drill? run around in circles? hide under our desks? sit in a bath tub? this ain’t oklahoma where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plains. i don’t know anyone with an underground area i can hide in.
If you can’t get underground (like a basement), you want to find an interior room in the building away from windows. Some buildings are built with reinforced central stairwells, others have a central room or rooms.
The Virginia Department of Emergency Management has a great site with details about the tornado drill, tornado preparedness and general emergency preparedness at: http://www.vdem.state.va.us/threats/tornado/index.cfm