OAK HILL, WV (WOAY) – Some light snow is falling in parts of the region tonight as a weak disturbance is pushing through. Accumulations will be light, as the air is fairly dry and temperatures are cold, making the snow the fluffy kind. Still, one or two of the bands of snow could be heavy enough to slow late evening commuters down.
The snow ends during the early morning hours on Wednesday, but the skies do not clear up. Instead, skies will remain mostly cloudy, and temperatures will remain much cooler than the seasonal average by around 20 degrees on both the low and high ends of the scale.
The cold trend lasts through the rest of the week, as the colder-than-normal pattern is still locked in for the eastern half of the nation. Even Florida, which hadn’t been affected by the recent cold snap before yesterday, is expecting a long stretch of well below normal temperatures.
Normally, those cold temperatures would be the big story in the weather, but this weekend we’ll be tracking a powerful Nor’Easter off the Atlantic coast. We know that a storm is expected to form off the Florida and Georgia coast along a stalled-out frontal boundary and move toward the northeast. This is not entirely unusual; storms such as this one form every winter in a similar area. This storm is forecast to become as strong as some Atlantic hurricanes, and its future movement will completely control the kind of weather that we get this weekend.
As was the case with the last storm, the two major atmospheric models have different solutions to this storm. The American GFS model is keeping the storm closer to the North Carolina and Virginia coasts, which would lead to huge issues for them, but would also lead to very snowy weather for us.
The European model keeps the storm much further from the coast and would give us some snowfall, but much less than the GFS.
Sound familiar? Over the next couple of days, we’ll get a better idea of what to expect with this next storm.
Click below to see the video version of the forecast…
