Sunday Snow hopes fading? (1/16/26, 12 pm)

Good Friday afternoon everyone! Winter weather coverage on Foothills Weather Network is sponsored by Wendy B’s Embroidery & Screen Printing located in Morganton.

We continue to monitor a developing storm system over the next 48 hours that could throw some moisture over the top of a cold airmass across the Southeast US. The past 12-24 hours have been important to our forecast as short range guidance is now taking over as the main guidance source for this feature.

If you look at the graphic below, we have updated some of the key components. The trend has been toward less impacts for the Western Carolinas on Sunday. We will go deeper into the setup here in a bit. Even though accumulating snow look to be fading, that still may not prevent snow flurries or brief snow showers from falling during the day on Sunday.

Also, the cold air associated with this feature is still expected to overtake the region leading to significantly colder than average temperatures across a large portion of the Southeast US next week.

So, what is the culprit to our snow chances going down? Our answer will provide a meteorological look at what is going on. Some of this may be too scientific to understand, we will do our best to simplify this.

By Sunday morning the base of a shortwave trough will be located over Louisiana in a positive-tilt fashion where the trough axis will orient itself from southwest-to-northeast.

If you look at the map below, you can see that positive tilt and the moisture that is associated with the storm itself and how it orients itself in relation to the trough axis.

In simple terms, think of this as like having a nozzle that is connected to a water hose. If you tilted the handle to where it was more vertical (north-south), the hose would also tilt to where the water will run out the hose in a different area.

That is essentially what is going on meteorologically speaking. A positive-tilt trough in Louisiana is going to force the moisture to run east-northeast ahead of the trough which by trajectory will send it south and east of our region. If we had a neutral-tilt (north-south), the moisture would be pulled further north and west and in the case of a negative tilt (northwest-to-southeast) the moisture plume would respond even more to the additional tilt.

The shame in all of this for snow lovers is that cold air is not going to be a problem this weekend. It is the trough orientation that will prevent our region from having a notable snow event.

So, as of right now we are leaning toward no accumulating snow from the Blue Ridge eastward to Charlotte Metro on Sunday. Can snow flurries still fly on Sunday? Yes…that is plausible.

At this time we have medium confidence in this forecast. Just to play it safe, we will continue to monitor for some last-minute adjustments. Afterall, models are pieces of guidance to a forecaster and not the end all, be all in forecasting.

With cold weather still in the cards and some novelty snowflakes not out of the question, we will keep our Winter Storm Index in its current place.