Early Monday Morning Update...Snow Tonight?

You'd think as we get close to any potential event, things would be clearer. It appeared to be heading that way Sunday afternoon (as posted), but now the model solutions are a bit convoluted. The NAM in its late night run produced a pretty good snowstorm for SE Virginia and northern NC, even extending into part of central Virginia on Tuesday. It has since backed off a bit for us (still looks pretty good for NC) and the big problem remains resolving the pieces of upper energy rotating into the eastern U.S. trough. There are several pieces and that has caused confusion in the model solutions.

Honestly, it doesn't look like we'll see much precipitation during the day...maybe a few snow showers (mixed with a little rain south and east). My focus remains on tonight into early tomorrow morning. Moisture races ahead of the upper level energy and there may be enough "lift" in the atmosphere to produce some light snow. With this in mind, we could still wake up to some accumulation...maybe around an inch or so in spots. Then as the surface low pressure takes shape, it moves off the Carolina coast. Remember in my Sunday afternoon blog post that I mentioned that what happens here depends on how fast the surface low develops and moves. Based on the latest data, it would appear the low doesn't really get its act together until it gets to or off the coast. If it is able to strengthen closer to the coast, then we could see a bit more snow and this might be more of a Tuesday event. But if it moves faster and farther off the coast, we could easily lose out on any decent precipitation. So we're still in a holding pattern at this point. The more data we get, hopefully the better feeling we'll have about what is coming in the next 24-36 hours. I think the best call is to stick with what we've got in the forecast, especially considering we've been hinting at this overall situation for many days now and sometimes the initial hunch is the right one! As always, stay tuned...