By Pam Knox
If you have travel plans or group events planned for late this week and next weekend, you should be paying careful attention to the weather forecasts this week. Even if you are not going anywhere, you should be prepared for the possibility of snow or ice cutting off power and clogging transportation corridors for a couple of days. You can already see the social media-rologists pumping out scary maps of big ice and snow storms occurring, especially on Saturday and Sunday. But even though it is far too early to get the details right, we do have a high confidence that impactful winter weather will occur in parts of the region.
The diagram below shows the general area for heavy snow and ice, but I am not showing specific model maps at this point because they are so likely to change over the next few days and they vary so much from one model to the next. Heavy snow is most likely to occur in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, while freezing rain is likely to occur south of that in a band that stretches all the way from Texas through northern MS and AL into northern GA and most of South Carolina. Note that while this is designated as the most likely place for snow and freezing rain to fall, the models are still quite varied.