Snow To Slam NC, VA Mountains, Maybe Downeast Maine

There might be scenes like this by Saturday
in the high elevations of North Carolina, Virginia
and Tennessee as winter storm looms.  

As I said yesterday, most of the Northeast is going to escape the full effects of a nor'easter that could have dropped a lot of snow on a lot of real estate this weekend.

It'll be too far out to sea to cause more than snow flurries, gusty north winds and a pre-winter chill.

However, some areas are still going to get slammed by snow.

The worst of it will hit the mid and high elevations of western North Carolina, western Virginia and eastern Tennessee.

A strong weather disturbance, a key ingredient that will set off the big ocean storm that's going to get going off the coast, is blasting southeastward from the Great Lakes with a package of cold, and rising air currents that will give rise to precipitation.

That means it's going to snow like hell as the disturbance passes over the middle Appalachian mountains. There's still a lot of leaves on the trees in many of these places. So the snow will cling to the leaves, weighing down the branches, snapping them and also taking power lines down with them.

If you want an idea of how nasty a snowstorm can be when leaves are still on the trees, just think back to the New Jersey, New York and the southern half of New England back in October, 2011 for an idea.

That 2011 storm cut power to 3.2 million people, some for as long as 11 days.

Tonight's Appalachian storm won't be nearly that widespread, but you get the idea.

The storm will then get cranking big time as it heads northeast, well off the Eastern Seaboard. It will hook close enough to the coast of Maine so that maybe the Downeast part of the state will get three to six inches of snow out of this.

The mountains of northern Vermont, northern New Hampshire and western Maine still look like they're in for one to three inches.

After that, windy and chilly, but mostly dry in most of the nation's eastern half by Sunday.