Winter is wasting no time letting us know it’s in the ring, though it’s not really punching us in the face, yet.
Monday’s start of meteorological winter with the first day of December was bracketed by two borderline cold rain/freezing rain scrapes for Southwest and Southside Virginia, one on Sunday morning, another in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday.
Now, Friday poses a significant, though far from certain, chance of the season’s first widespread accumulating snowfall, which we would define here as at least an inch over half or more of Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area (the part in front of the chest and below the beak in the Cardinal News logo).
All this got going before I put forth my own numbers in the snowfall prediction contest that over 100 of you entered. I’m doing that today, at the end of this column, with a few words about my own winter expectations, for whatever those may be worth.
But first, let’s look at this week.
Friday snowfall potential?
Snows in the first week of December were a staple of this century’s first decade. Between 2002 and 2010, the first week of December provided at least an inch of snow four to six times at Blacksburg, Roanoke, Lynchburg, Lexington and Wytheville, for just a sampling of sites through the middle of Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia region. (The Southwest corner often has early snow, while Southside Virginia more rarely does.) There were fairly large 4-8-inch type snowfall events in the first week of December in both 2002 and 2003.
But since then, and even in most decades before that stretch, even the super-snowy 1960s and 1970s, widespread snowfall beyond the typical mountain snow showers has generally waited for at least the second week of December to get going, and quite often it hasn’t started until the new year. The nearly regionwide 1-2-foot snow of Dec. 9-10, 2018, is the most recent example of a big snowfall coming barely outside the first week of December.
Nothing on the scale of 2018 is on the table this week, but a wave of upper-level low-pressure tracking generally west to east across the southern half of the nation may be able to lift just enough moisture on Friday into a dense pocket of cold air trapped against the mountains by high pressure to the north.
With the upper-level low and its surface reflection likely tracking to our south roughly over the border between the Carolinas, our area would be in the cold sector with a more chilled atmosphere top to bottom than we saw for the weekend borderline rain/ice events. That would raise the likelihood that much of the precipitation, at least in the first hours early Friday, would be snow.
Again, we’re not talking about a huge storm here, maybe an inch or two, 3 to 5 if it really maxed out. There are also lots of things that can still happen to stymie the snow, including the system being suppressed too far south, weakening to the point it lacks the lift or moisture necessary for much in the way of snow, or arriving a bit too late when atmospheric conditions may be warmer later Friday or on Saturday, leading to mix and cold rain.
But this is on the board as a serious possibility for Friday, primarily the morning hours. If there is still a solid chance it will happen by Thursday night, you’ll see another article post on Cardinal News.
There might be another chance of snow or wintry mix on Monday, but we’ll let that ride for now.
Ice for some, cold wetness for all
There may be nothing more difficult in weather forecasting and communication than a borderline rain-freezing rain event, like our region experienced both Sunday and Tuesday mornings.
For a large number of people in our region, these were just a couple of mornings of cold puddles. Others had a little ice on their car tops and trees but really no ill effects beyond that. But for some, one or both mornings had icy, treacherous roads.
These freezing rain events happen when moisture is pulled northward on the warm side of a low-pressure system, usually tracking somewhere to our west. Cold air may be trapped against the mountains at the surface, and the rain falls into that cold air and freezes on objects, and on the ground when it is cold enough, usually several degrees below freezing or after multiple days of much-below-freezing temperatures.
Borderline rain/freezing rain events are the bane of winter for weather forecasters, who can have some people wondering “Where’s the ice?” when their schools are opening two hours late, while others a degree or 2 colder a few miles away are saying, “You didn’t say it was going to be this bad.”
Both of the cold rain/freezing rain episodes went about like expected, which meant some of you had 32.5-degree rain and others had some ice at 31.7 degrees. Almost undoubtedly, whether this winter ends up cold or mild, snowy or not, we’ll have at least two or three more of these agonizing borderline ice calls to make. And don’t presume the next one at your house will turn out exactly like the last one did.
What will winter as a whole bring?
Nobody knows the answer to this question, of course, though many of you have offered your best guesses in the snowfall prediction contest that concluded taking entries Saturday.
My thoughts all along have been that this winter would be similar to last winter with the ability of cold air to be pushed southward repeatedly. Some of the same large-scale drivers that forced cold air southward last winter have continued or repeated in the intervening months. And it is true historically that similar winters often come in packs of two or three.
Whether it will be similar in terms of being an icy but not all that snowy winter is harder to guess, as that comes down to how individual storm setups play out, week to week. Our region narrowly missed having a bigger snowfall at least three times last winter.
Generally, I am expecting this winter to be near to slightly below normal in temperature, with near-normal precipitation, and snowfall that is near to slightly above normal. There may again be multiple mixed or ice events as well, similar to last winter.
Those going for a milder forecast are expecting the La Niña, the irregularly recurring phenomenon of cooling equatorial Pacific sea-surface temperatures, to play a large role in how the winter plays out. Winters where La Niña is present tend to learn milder and drier in our region, but there are enough exceptions to keep this from being close to an iron-clad rule. And even milder La Niña winters do often have short but sharp Arctic outbreaks.
My bet is the La Niña will be weak, fade in mid-winter, and be overcome by other factors leading to a somewhat colder outlook — similar to last winter, when near-La Niña conditions were observed in the Pacific through much of winter before barely qualifying as an official La Niña late in the season.
My snowfall picks in inches for the 10 regional sites used in the contest are below. I am betting on one storm system coming together for 6-plus inches of snow over a large part of our region … but probably not two of them.
Abingdon: 18
Appomattox: 14
Blacksburg: 25
Burke’s Garden: 40
Clintwood: 45
Danville: 11
Lynchburg: 15
Martinsville: 12
Roanoke: 18
Wytheville: 21
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.
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