What officials are warning about
With many Americans still recovering from previous rounds of snow and freezing temperatures across the nation’s northern tier, forecasters said another storm is set to emerge late this week and into the weekend. They warned it could coat roads, trees and power lines with ice across a wide area of the South, stretching from Texas to the Carolinas.
“widespread potentially catastrophic event from Texas to the Carolinas,” Ryan Maue, a former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said as the forecast took shape. Maue also said, “I don’t know how people are going to deal with it.”
Forecasters said ice could weigh down trees and power lines, triggering widespread outages, and they urged people to prepare for the possibility of significant disruptions. Keith Avery, CEO of the Newberry Electric Cooperative in South Carolina, said that if you “get a half of an inch of ice — or heaven forbid an inch of ice — that could be catastrophic.”
Timing, precipitation type and forecast uncertainty
The National Weather Service said “great swaths of heavy snow, sleet, and treacherous freezing rain” are expected to begin Friday in much of the nation’s midsection and then shift toward the East Coast through Sunday. Officials also said temperatures would be slow to warm in many areas, meaning ice that forms on roads and sidewalks could stick around.
The forecast’s exact timing and where the worst conditions would occur remained uncertain, forecasters said on Tuesday. They cautioned that it can be challenging to predict precisely which areas could see rain and which ones could be hit with ice.
How the cold and moisture could combine
The storm setup described by forecasters centers on cold air pushing south from Canada and running into rain coming eastward across the southern U.S. Bryan Jackson, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said the cold air would be “extreme, even for this being the peak of winter.”
Jackson said the likely result when the cold air meets rain would be “a major winter storm with very impactful weather,” adding that the moisture would come up from the Gulf and encounter the particularly cold air “that’s spilling in.” He linked the developing pattern to a “large sprawling vortex of low pressure centered over Hudson Bay,” which Jackson said was dominating weather across North America.
Forecasters also said an atmospheric river of moisture could be in place by the weekend, pulling precipitation across Texas and other Gulf Coast states and continuing into Georgia and the Carolinas. The National Weather Service’s Atlanta office said global models were painting “a concerning picture” with an increasingly strong signal for ice storm potential across North Georgia and portions of central Georgia.
Potential impacts in the South and travel disruptions
Forecasters said if significant ice accumulations strike metro Atlanta, conditions could remain a problem through the weekend because low temperatures early Monday were expected to be around 22 degrees in Atlanta and the city’s high on Monday was forecast to be around 35 degrees. They said southern states would have less equipment to remove snow and ice from roads, and that extremely cold temperatures after the storm could prevent ice from melting for several days.
The storm also was expected to tangle travel plans, with impacts forecast for many of the nation’s major hub airports, including those in Dallas; Atlanta; Memphis, Tennessee; and Charlotte, North Carolina. In Michigan, the AP reported that more than 100 vehicles crashed into each other or slid off an interstate southwest of Grand Rapids on Monday, underscoring the risks associated with icy conditions.
Early look at Texas’ risk
Some of the storm’s earliest impacts could be in Texas on Friday, National Weather Service forecaster Sam Shamburger said, describing a setup in which arctic air would slide south while rain moved into much of the state. Shamburger said low temperatures could fall into the 20s or even the teens in parts of Texas by Saturday, with potential for a wintery mix in the northern part of the state.
Forecasters cautioned that significant uncertainty remains, particularly over how much ice or snow could fall across north and central Texas. Shamburger said, “It’s going to be a very difficult forecast.”
Residents stock up in Arkansas
In Little Rock, Arkansas, customers stocked up on supplies at Fuller and Son Hardware on Tuesday. James Carter, the company’s director of operations, said, “Right now parents of young children are getting sleds,” and he said people were also getting shovels, ice-melting products and covers for outside faucets to keep them from freezing. Carter added that low temperatures in the Little Rock area were forecast to fall into the teens.
Associated Press correspondent Haya Panjwani reported on winter weather across the U.S. Panjwani reported from Washington, and Seth Borenstein in Washington and Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed.