As they say in farm country, looks like we’re going to get some weather and to talk to us about that. Corey Davis, Assistant State Climatologist for North Carolina. Now, parts of the country had a system that came through last weekend, brought some ice and snow and stuff, and now it looks like parts of the Carolinas are going to get some of that today and tomorrow. Tell us what we’re in for.

“Finally, getting some cold air in place is the first ingredient for anything wintry. Of course, the other ingredient is getting some moisture, and that’s what we’re looking at now. There’s a low pressure system that’s forming down along the Gulf Coast this morning. Again, it has taken this long into the week to get that storm forming. That’s always one of the challenges with forecasting wintry weather in North Carolina. You’ve got to wait until a day or so before the event starts to even see that system that’s going to produce our precipitation. But we will be looking for that system to track up along the Gulf Coast, and then up our east coast line throughout the day today into early tomorrow. That will bring a decent amount of moisture, not a huge amount of moisture, but it looks like that will bring some snow, maybe some sleet, and possibly some freezing rain, especially across North Carolina.”

ell us what areas you think we’re going to see that precipitation in some sort of frozen form and where it’s just simply going to be water.

“Yeah, as a rule of thumb, folks further north and further west have a better chance of seeing snow and even staying all snow through this event. So we’re talking about, of course, in the mountains, but also parts of northern Piedmont in North Carolina, in the triad where I’m at, I think will probably stay snow for most of the event, maybe changing over to sleet at some point in the early hours of tomorrow morning. But then as we get further south and east, that’s where we’ll see that transition zone setup. This happens in almost every one of our wintry events, where we start getting warm air just off the ground that mixes in and that causes that falling precipitation to melt, and then follows either sleet or freezing rain. One bit of good news with this storm is it will be a pretty fast moving storm. It’ll be in and out at about 12 hours, so that will not give as much time for that warmer air to build in a deep layer off the ground. That means we shouldn’t see as much of a freezing rain event. But especially in the Raleigh area and also out towards Charlotte, it looks like precipitation may start as snow for a few hours, eventually change over, probably to sleet. Can’t rule out a little bit of freezing rain there, but it’ll be that classic wintry mix that we tend to see. And then as you head further south and east from there, especially along the coastline and then down across a good chunk of South Carolina, this will just be one of those annoying cold rain events, so not as much impact in those areas. But certainly, they will be looking at the snow totals coming in for the North and wishing they were there instead.”