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| Car far off the road in icy Memphis, Tenn. this morning. Photo via Twitter, @local24rodney |
Oh, sure it was ugly in Boston this morning. At 5 a.m., for instance, the temperature was 1 below zero, winds were from the northwest gusting to 38 mph and the wind chill was 25 below.
Plus, Massachusetts is so mired in feet of snow I don't know how they'll ever dig out.
However, the next winter storm is hitting places like Little Rock and Memphis. In those two cities, freezing rain had been falling for hours as dawn broke. Travel is next to impossible there, so good luck getting to work today if you live in that general area.
Really, just work from home. Assuming you have electricity. Enough freezing rain is going to fall in parts of Arkansas and Tennessee today that trees, branches and power lines will snap. You'll hear lots of news today about the power failures and crashes there.
It's all spreading east, too, so places like northern Mississippi and Alabama, the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, and big towns like Raleigh, North Carolina are due late today, tonight and tomorrow for freezing rain, scary traveling conditions and power failures.
North of that line of freezing rain, the Ohio Valley is getting hammered by snow. It's already snowing at a pretty good clip there, and that should, if anything, pick up in intensity during the day.
Some areas of Kentucky could receive up to 15 inches of snow, and six to 12 inches will be common. In places that approach 15 inches of snow, those are near record deep accumulations for a snowstorm.
Winter storm warnings extend all the way to Washington DC, Virginia, Maryland and southern New Jersey, where four to ten inches of snow is expected, mostly tonight.
Most of the big snows have steered around the Washington DC area this winter, so this will be a switch for them. This will likely be the first real good snowstorm they've had all winter.
The storm causing this is not super strong, certainly not like the nor'easter that slammed eastern New England the Canadian Maritime provinces over the weekend.
But this new system, traveling east, eventually through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, then off the Carolina coast, has plenty of Gulf of Mexico moisture to work with, and plenty of Arctic air to the north to feed into the system.
Hence, the huge mess.
In places that get the heavy snow and ice, it's going to stick around for awhile, as another blast of Arctic air slumps its way into the eastern half of the nation.
The storm still looks as if it will give a glancing blow to New England instead of a full-throttle dumping. Things could change, but the best guess from the National Weather Service in Massachusetts is two to four inches, mostly south of a Hartford, Connecticut to Boston line.
Given the bad luck New England has had, though, there is one more complication. A finger of lower air pressure poking into eastern New England from the Atlantic could linger as the storm passes Wednesday.
The setup is called a Norlun trough. It is very hard to forecast much in advance if it will set up, and exactly where. These troughs don't cause heavy snow over a vast area, but can over a more localized zone, say, 40 or 50 miles wide.
If a Norlun trough were to set up somewhere in Massachusetts on Wednesday, that would just be crushing. Literally even, as there's so much snow on roofs that some are caving in.
We just have to hope our old buddy Norlun stays away from New England this week.
By the way, the cold, and possibly outbreaks of snow, will linger through the end of the month in the Northeast.
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