BLOG: Damp Saturday

There'll be dry weather today, but the sun we encounter early will start to fade behind increasing and thickening clouds this afternoon. A winter storm that is bringing some sleet and freezing rain to Houston and snow to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex this morning will be heading into the Carolinas later this afternoon, then it will start to head northward late tonight and tomorrow.

Not making any changes to the tonight and tomorrow ideas. Given the surface temperatures being shown on the model grids, there may be rather minimal icing, especially in the city and in points east and south. But it is a close enough call that I would rather not remove it or play it down. For the most part during the day tomorrow we are looking at a rain event. I am concerned, given the track of the surface low and the short wave, precipitation could linger for a
time tomorrow evening, and if that is the case it could mix with or change to snow before ending tomorrow night.

At this juncture, it looks as if precipitation will start in Baltimore and in other areas close to the I-95 corridor as a mixture of sleet and rain that will freeze on contact with untreated surfaces between midnight and 2 or 3 a.m. -- with all forms of precipitation eventually changing over to plain rain tomorrow morning, probably by 5 a.m. in the city and 7 or 8 a.m. in most northern and western suburbs.

The rationale for this forecast is that there will be so much warming occurring above the boundary layer (above 2,000 feet) at the very start of this event late tonight, that once the low pressure system reaches a latitude near the Delmarva Peninsula (in fact, it may pass DIRECTLY OVER the Delmarva Peninsula) early tomorrow afternoon, the air will be warm enough both at the surface and aloft to support plain rain. There will be a prolonged period of snow and ice in northeastern Pennsylvania, southeastern New York and in New England, but these areas are all well to your NORTH.