Today and Tonight

Sunday, February 22, 9AM

Light rain has commenced across the area with snow already mixing in along the MD/PA border. Regardless of whether your area changes to snow later this morning or afternoon, temperatures should remain above freezing in the metro areas, so travel today shouldn’t be a problem. The exception is northern MD and areas with elevation where temps will be slightly lower.

My expectations for this storm have been somewhat muted for our area as I felt that things would end up east of us, but the recent model runs, particularly the short-range models, have me pretty excited for tonight into early Monday morning. If central MD is going to get any decent accumulations, it won’t happen until late this afternoon and into the overnight hours when colder air is pulled into the system and we lose the sun. Along the 95 corridor, I think snow becomes an issue around 4PM north of Baltimore to 6PM down by DC. Total snow accumulations from around 3″ down towards DC, and increasing to up to 8″ just northeast of Baltimore are possible, with that 8″ amount spreading west along the northern tier. There’s also going to be a narrow band somewhere, oriented on a line from northwest to southeast, that is going to get dumped on and has the potential for up to 12″. That will be a now-casting issue as it’s impossible to know where it happens. If anyone is interested in what causes this phenomenon in these types of systems, google norlun trough. So, for central MD, let’s just with a general 4 – 8″ by Monday morning.

I don’t have a lot of confidence in the accumulations that I stated, but I’ll be watching this all day and will probably annoy you with updates as the coastal storm develops. On that topic, if anyone wants to check in occasionally on the coastal development, this is a nice radar site for it. Click on the link, uncheck the Weather Stations box, check the Radar box, and then zoom out to get a nice view of our area and the coastal areas from NC to NY. Hit the play button and increase the speed to 5x. More later.