February 12, 2021 archive

Updated: 02.12.21 @ 7:34a

Use This Weekend To Prep…The short-term portion of this forecast is relatively quiet. Take advantage and prepare for significant winter weather next week. We may even see a few breaks in the cloud cover today. All in all, look for mostly cloudy and continued cold conditions. Keep in mind, average highs this time of year should be close to 40°. We’ll be nowhere near that anytime soon. In fact, most days will feature high temperatures even colder than average lows for this time of year!

Reinforcing arctic air will penetrate the area Saturday and will likely kick up some light snow showers- especially during the afternoon. Light snow will remain a possibility Valentine’s Day, but “light” is the key word.

The more exciting part of this forecast comes at us as we open the work week. Surface low pressure will develop in the northwest Gulf of Mexico Sunday night and track northeast up along the Appalachians. This will spread a swath of snow into the Ohio Valley through the day Monday. It appears as if snow will become heavy at times Monday evening into the predawn hours Tuesday before tapering to light snow/ snow showers late Tuesday morning. This will be a much more powdery snow than we typically see with these Gulf storms, due to having truly arctic air involved with the storm. Gusty winds will create significant blowing and drifting issues throughout the early and middle portion of the work week.

That then leads us to the threat of another significant winter storm as we push into Wednesday night into Friday morning. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but the threat is very real that this storm also deals out heavy impacts across the region with additional heavy snow possible during the aforementioned time frame.

We’d suggest using the weekend to prepare for the potential of two back-to-back “big deal” winter storms. We’ll be here through the weekend with additional updates.

Averages: H: 39/ L: 23° on the 12th –> H: 41°/ L: 25° on the 18th