Want to be the first to see weather news? Sign up for our weekly email weather newsletter, featuring weather journalist Kevin Myatt.
It was 38 degrees in Martinsville on Tuesday afternoon when a tornado warning was issued.
That may sum up better than anything the wild weather week we, and much of the eastern two-thirds of the United States, are experiencing, as a hyper-juiced El Niño-influenced winter weather pattern flexes its muscle with not one but two almost identical powerhouse low-pressure systems, spreading heavy rain, strong winds, severe storms, tornadoes, ice, snow, and seemingly everything short of locusts and asps.
The first storm system tracked Tuesday from Oklahoma to Michigan, the second will follow suit on Friday perhaps 150 miles or so east of the first storm’s track, with very similar widespread impacts. For Cardinal News’ country from the tip of Southwest Virginia to Buggs Island Lake and everything north to Interstate 64, it will be another all-day soaking rain that might begin as brief wintry mix or ice in higher elevations.
But each one of these lows is tugging extremely cold Arctic air moving out of Canada into the western and central U.S. a little closer to us, and Friday’s storm is likely to bring a blast of moderate chill — 30s and 40s highs, teens and 20s lows — by the weekend. Next week may bring a couple mornings of single-digit and teens lows toward midweek. The deepest chill, with below-zero lows, is likely to stay a few states to our west and northwest.
And having much more cold air available to tap could cause any new storm systems moving through next week to do something besides just rain across most of our region. We’ll get back to that.
Roaring winds and pouring rain
There was apparently no tornado, by the way, in Henry County and Martinsville, though one likely did cross Interstate 40 in North Carolina not long before. Rotating storms formed near a sharp boundary between the cold-air wedge stuck against the mountains and milder air surging northward through flatter terrain, rotated around the strong low. While Martinsville was stuck in the 30s, Danville just 30 miles east had soared to the mid 50s.
There were many reports of wind damage, however, in Southside and Central Virginia, eastward to the coast, a combination of strong downdrafts with a squall line that pushed through and gusty winds that blew form the southeast much of the afternoon with the low-pressure system’s circulation. (Areas underneath the cold wedge largely escaped these winds, as they couldn’t mix to the surface well through the dense air trapped against the mountains, with uneven reports of gusts in the mountains varying with terrain.)
Most locations in our region received between 1.5 and 3 inches of rain on Tuesday, with some spots getting more. While some sporadic flooding occurred, problems could be worse if Friday’s storm system dumps similar amounts — there are some signals rainfall may be more moderate on Friday than it was on Tuesday.
By Monday, which is the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and Tuesday, an upper-level wave moving through the southern United States will potentially be in position to stir up some precipitation over some section of the South and East. At this writing, the track and evolution of this system are very unclear to the point that it’s not entirely certain there will be a widespread precipitation event at all.
But the overall atmospheric pattern, for the first time in at least two years, is generally supportive of a winter storm in or near our region, as the jet stream flows farther south around a mass of cold air dislodged by high pressure near the North Pole and Greenland, and high pressure even develops in western North America to help press the cold air down as well. This window for a possible winter storm may continue for about 7-10 days, with no guarantee that a winter storm affecting our region actually comes to fruition.
Don’t expect much more than a vague “possible wintry mix” or “rain and snow” in any regional forecast until after we get past the second big storm system this weekend, because what happens with these two large low-pressure systems changes the shape of the chessboard for the next piece to move.
Last week’s forecast progression toward ice rather than snow may give us all some pause in describing or discerning the description of the next wintry weather threat, be it next week or beyond.
Saturday’s ice
Several TV weather forecasters took unfair flak on social media this past weekend for a forecast they didn’t make.
Though there had been some early week speculative social media chatter that Saturday’s setup might produce a snowstorm for the region — not entirely implausible based on some early data — there was no expectation of a widespread or significant snowstorm communicated by any reputable weather source by Friday of last week. Yet, somehow, television weather social media in the Roanoke-Lynchburg market drew several commenters making the same tired and trite comments about getting paid for being wrong when, in fact, the later forecasts were not wrong in focusing on freezing rain and cold “plain rain” rather than snow.
Saturday’s forecast continually marched more toward ice and cold rain late last week as it became more obvious that milder air aloft would be pulled farther northward, eliminating the possibility of significant snow except in the northwest edge of the state.
As is always the case with near-freezing temperatures and mostly liquid precipitation, results varied across our region based on terrain factors and very localized quirks in temperature sometimes amounting to a few tenths of degree. This, of course, varied the experience considerably among regional residents from some who witnessed only a cold rain to others who were worried about their trees bending and power blinking.
Very generally speaking, localities along the Blue Ridge from Floyd County, around and through the Roanoke Valley, and northward experienced the most ice, as temperatures stubbornly refused to rise above freezing in many of these locations before the rain moved on. Elsewhere, both to the east and west, most locations saw brief ice early in the day and then temperatures rose above freezing for cold rain, but there were pockets where ice was heavier and lasted longer, and others that skipped ice altogether. West of Interstate 77, especially near the Tennessee state line, many spots were closer to 40 than freezing as rain fell.
The ice stopped accumulating just in time before tree damage and power outages would have started becoming numerous, with top ice accretions generally 0.15 to 0.25 inch. Some higher elevations near the West Virginia line experienced enough upslope-driven snow squalls behind the storm for some accumulation by Sunday.
The wintry precipitation event was definitely not what it could have been with somewhat colder air or a slightly more southerly track, but it did slicken some roads for a while in higher elevations and got close enough to being an “ice storm” for many to remind us all what is yet possible as we still have 10 or more weeks when wintry precipitation and larger winter storms are a reasonable possibility across our region.
We’ve only just begun with wintry wondering.
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.
