Virginia is going to experience a winter storm this weekend. That appears to be as certain as anything in weather can be still three days away.
This isn’t something that can be easily “missed,” as it involves a broad sweep of moisture lifted by an upper-level low moving into and over Arctic air expanding southward over much of the central and eastern U.S.
This isn’t going to be a narrow band of precipitation that shifts 100 miles and the sun burns through the clouds on Sunday, and it’s not going to be in the mid-30s and just rain.
But exactly what form the storm will take in the end for our Southwest and Southside Virginia region is still a bit amorphous.
But my phone app says …
Many folks’ smartphone weather apps have flashed huge amounts of snow this weekend, channeling the latest run of whatever forecast model that particular app is tied to.
But none of that is really “what they say” this storm will do, whoever “they” may be, but rather reflective of a single point of data in a sea of information ebbing and flowing against the shores of social media.
Realistically, at this Wednesday night posting, most of the region has a good chance to get 6 or more inches of snow. There is a good chance the snow will mix with sleet or freezing rain for a while, especially the closer one is to the North Carolina line. The first widespread foot-plus storm since December 2018 is still on the table as a possibility, especially if sleet/ice mix is on the lower end of potential.
Cardinal News’ coverage area encompasses the region from the southwest tip of Virginia east to near Buggs Island Lake/Kerr Reservoir and north to Interstate 64 — or everything in front of the chest and below the beak of the bird in our logo. Expect to see a new article in Cardinal News by Friday night looking ahead to the weekend winter storm.
There will likely be enough moisture to support large snowfall totals, perhaps even as much as your smartphone app and many forecast models have been showing this week. If, that is, it stays entirely as snow.
The winter storm setup this weekend is not the most common kind to dump a foot or more of snow across our region.
Typically, our foot-plus type of snows come from what are known as Miller A storms, where a surface low-pressure system forms along the Gulf Coast and then tracks eastward and northeastward along the East Coast.
But this one is what is known as an overrunning setup, with a wide spray of moisture lifted northward and northeastward into Arctic air, and it may ultimately become something resembling a Miller B type storm, with an inland low pressure system tracking eastward over the South transferring its spin to a new low along the coast of the Carolinas or Virginia Capes.
These types of setups tend to bring greater amounts of mild air aloft northward toward our region over layers of cold air than do Miller A storms. And that introduces the possibility that sleet or freezing rain could become part of our winter storm as well as snow.
In a band somewhere across the Deep South and likely into much of the Carolinas, this system is going to be a hellacious ice storm, with tree damage and large-scale power outages. We had plenty of that last winter. Hopefully not again this weekend.
But the southern half of Virginia in particular may be just far enough south that the latter hours of this storm on Sunday include some mixed in sleet – bouncy ice pellets – or freezing rain – liquid rain that freezes on contact with cold surfaces.
All snow, or a wintry mix?
Snow mixing with or changing to sleet or freezing rain would cut down on potential snow totals.
Sleet continues to collect somewhat like snow, and even gets counted as snowfall, but you get only an inch or so of sleet from the same moisture that would be about 3 inches of snow. Freezing rain just creates a crunchy glaze on top of snowfall — it doesn’t get counted as snowfall, and if there is enough, it weighs down on the snowpack and compresses it.
Figuring out how far north the sleet and freezing rain get, and how much time duration those precipitation types last if they do occur, is going to be the devil in the details with this weekend’s winter storm.
This may turn out differently across our region, with sleet and freezing rain perhaps edging into the Southwest corner and/or Southside Virginia but perhaps not penetrating much farther north. If that happens, there may be a wide disparity in snowfall north to south across our region.
And of course there is still at least some chance that sleet and freezing rain prove more pervasive than currently expected, and we end up with less snowfall and more ice. The strength of Arctic air pressing in from the north, and being pressed against the Appalachians by high pressure to the north, would argue against this being likely, at least for now.
Temperatures are going to be in the teens and 20s throughout all of this, so whatever falls is going to collect on roadways and be a big mess.
There are a lot of moving parts in this upstream for us that can change how this plays out for our specific region with relatively minor shifts.
We’ll plan to revisit this on Cardinal News by Friday evening with a look ahead to the weekend winter storm.
The big one?
So will this be the big one?
My informal definition of the “big one” for the purposes of Cardinal Weather is 12 or more inches of snow over at least 50 percent of Cardinal News’ coverage area from Cumberland Gap to Buggs Island Lake north to Interstate 64 — everything in front of the chest and below the beak of the cardinal in our logo.
While some places from Covington east to Lexington topped a foot in a storm last February, and a random spot or two especially at higher elevations may have scraped a foot in some other storms, the last real regional “big one” was Dec. 9-10, 2018.
We average about two of these a decade, so we are a bit overdue — though we had four of them 2009-2018 after none in the prior 11 years, so these don’t come at regular intervals.
This has some chance to be the next “big one” for Southwest and Southside Virginia, more so by far than any other storm since December 2018. But mixing challenges may to be too great to overcome.
We should have a much better idea by Friday night if this is likely going to be “the big one” across our region, or just another “big ice” or “big mess.”
Stay tuned.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.
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