Huge Snowstorm, Frigid Temperatures this Week

According to Accuweather anyway. About 1/3 of the country will be getting snow and ice so make sure you’re well stocked:

The storm will be a “two-parter.” The first part will roll southeastward along the Front Range of the Rockies this weekend, spreading accumulating snow over the I-25 corridor in the northern and central Rockies.

The storm is entering British Columbia, Canada now and will spread low-elevation rain and mountain snow into part of the Northwest later Friday into Saturday. The ground could be whitened around Seattle Saturday night.

A swath of moderate to heavy snow will stretch from western and central Montana to central and eastern Colorado. If you have flights in or out of Denver Sunday, expect delays with several inches of snow possible.

A bit of slippery snow will also spill west of the Divide into Salt Lake City and Boise.

Essentially, for the Plains, the zone from the I-40 to I-70 corridors appears to be in the thick of this one. Snow will spread over part of the southern and central Plains Sunday into Monday. Amarillo, Pueblo, Wichita, Kansas City and perhaps Oklahoma City could all be impacted.

As the storm rolls eastward, it will undergo changes with a transfer of energy likely toward a new storm forming near the Gulf Coast. We have seen it before during this season.

Since the cold will be so deeply entrenched in the South and moisture will be carried eastward from the Rockies, snow and ice will likely fall over the interior South, while snow still falls as far north as the Ohio Valley during the Sunday-Monday period.

Problems with ice or a wintry mix may extend as far south as the I-20 corridor, especially in Alabama and Georgia. At the same time, accumulating snow will still reach into St. Louis and Cincinnati, while Nashville and at least the suburbs around Atlanta could be in for a nasty wintry mix, or even an ice storm.

The risk of an ice storm would become more prevalent over upstate South Carolina and northern and western North Carolina Sunday night and Monday, including Charlotte, Winston-Salem and perhaps Richmond.

The same storm will bring drenching, needed rain to the Deep South, according to AccuWeather.com Meteorologist Heather Buchman.

From here it is all about the southern storm taking over as the dominant feature, possibly spreading a swath of heavy snow into the I-95 Northeast, with a wintry mix in southern Virginia, Delmarva and perhaps South Jersey.

If behaving as some of our forecast tools suggest at this point, the storm would be sizable enough to throw significant snow over the northern and western suburbs from Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia to New York City and Boston.

The snowstorm would hit the mid-Atlantic on Tuesday, then New England late Tuesday into early Wednesday.

Here’s a video report.