Winter Weather Update #2. Who Will See Snow and Who Could Miss Out. Updated Snowfall Total Forecast and Timeline Included.

Good Thursday afternoon everyone. I hope your day is off to a good start! Sunset today is at 5:49pm. We are adding 1:40 seconds to the daylight today because the sun came up one minute earlier this morning too. There is a big difference too in the sun’s angle for late January, compared to early January. That will help melt anything that falls in this event a little quicker than it did even last week.

The system partially responsible for bringing the 3rd chance of snow to the region for the 3rd weekend in a row will begin to develop this afternoon. Here is our current surface map as of 11:00am this morning.

High pressure continues to control our area today. Low pressure develops off the East Florida Peninsula this afternoon. Here is how the surface map will look in 6 hours.

As the surface map indicates, low pressure will likely develop off of the West Palm Beach Coast. This will move North-Northeast and strengthen while doing so. Models have come into great agreement this over the last 24 hours with the track of the low pressure system. That cold front that is located over the Upper Midwest will dive southeast toward our area and arrive into the mountains Friday Evening. Normally this cold front would not produce any snow outside the mountains if it were coming through without any other dynamics in place.

This cold front will begin to phase with the low pressure off of the coast of North Carolina though. As the phase of the two weather systems begin Friday Night, a deformation band of precipitation will likely develop over Western NC and quickly move East. Precipitation may start as a rain/snow mix but it would quickly go over to all snow as the atmosphere dynamically cools. Temps will drop from the upper 30’s and into the upper 20’s fairly quickly early Friday Night. This looks like a very similar event to what the area received last weekend. Roads may be snow covered with patchy ice overnight Friday into Saturday but we are still not expecting major impacts to travel. If you take it slow and easy, you should be able to get to your destination without any problem.

Winds will start to increase Friday Night as well. Winds will veer to the Northwest as the front passes with gusts to 25 – 30mph likely through the night and into Saturday. This could cause an isolated to widely scattered power outage.

Here are the latest graphics.