Evening Update Southeast Storm Wicked Bad, As Expected

The Weather Channel's Jim Cantore ready for the
storm on location in Raleigh, North Carolina today.
If Cantore is in your town you know you're totally
screwed in terms of bad weather. 

As has been advertised, the winter storm in the Southeast has screwed things up royaly in the region, and will continue to do so.

It will get worse tonight.  

The overall philosphy of the storm is roughly the same as this morning.  The deepest snow will hit in northeastern North Carolina and eastern Virginia, where some places could get a foot or a little more of snow.

No biggie if we were talking New England, but this is the South. They're not happy down there.

One interesting tidbit is the addition of a blizzard warning for a small portion of coastal Virginia around Norfolk and Virginia Beach tonight, as well as the southern tip of Maryland.

The combination of about a foot of snow and winds gusting to 45 mph will create blizzard conditions in those areas tonight. If you're there. stay in tonight for sure.

A few counties in Alabama have issued travel curfews this evening. Snow, sleet and freezing rain has made roads so treacherous that people pretty much banned from driving tonight, unless there's an emergency or they're driving to a critical job.

Give the fact that the South isn't used to winter storms, states of emergency have been declared in Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia.

As noted this morning, this storm will clip southeastern New England with four to eight inches of snow. A winter storm warning is up for that region tonight and tomorrow.  Again, this won't be the biggest New England storm ever, that's for sure, but heavy snow combined with gusty winds won't make things easy in Boston, the Cape and the Island.

There will be sharp cutoff to snow amounts to the northwest in New England, so there will be few impacts in Vermont. Maybe a little light snow in the southeast corner of the state.

After the storm leaves the Southeast, skies down there will clear. Sunday night, the combination of cold air from the north, a snow cover which encourages heat to radiate to space, and clear skies that do the same, temperatures could hit lows not seen in the region since at least 1996.

The Weather Channel is forecast overnight temperatures Sunday night to go as low as 2 degrees in Raleigh, North Carolina and 4 in Richmond Virginia

Once again.that's no big deal by northern standards, but for the South, that means lots of frozen pipes and other cold weather nightmares.

The good news for the Southeast is the weather will warm dramatically by midweek. The National Weather Service forecasts high temperatures in Raleigh of 56 degrees on Wednesday and 65 degrees by Friday.