WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY TONIGHT

5:50am UPDATE:  My gauges are at 32 and 33 degrees.  No icing here at the end of Staymon on vegetation, deck, etc.  The BIG story next is wind and cold, along with light frozen precipitation Thursday night into early Friday morning.  I'll post more on that later this morning.

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This is most likely Part 1 of II in terms of winter weather notifications.  The second part will be for Thursday night into at least Friday.

Tonight:  ACA is in a Winter Weather Advisory from 7pm until 9am for accumulating freezing rain, basically above 3500' elevation (above the blue roof house).  Should it begin accumulating on the roads, then serious travel issues are likely until it switches to all rain Thursday (for a while).  

This is a situation that is more likely as you approach the southern escarpment of the Blue Ridge, and almost a non-issue the closer you get to the TN border.  In that sense we may be spared here in ACA.  As is always the case in icing events, the first sign is icing on vegetation, followed by icing on cars, decks, stairs.  Roads are the last to succumb to ice.

I will be on the mountain the whole time, so will update as needed.

Thursday night into Friday morning is when the Part II should show up, which is the rapidly crashing temperatures with (limited) back-side snow.  Oftentimes when we have rain, then the cold and snow, there is a period of no precipitation and evaporation takes place in the cold dry air, avoiding an icy base.  I'm not convinced we'll have that luxury, late tomorrow.

Why so little snow to come? (heavy dusting to MAYbe an inch)  The jet stream will have stayed too long on the west side of the Appalachians.  We'll get the bitter cold, but there will be little moisture to work with, and the ensuing northwest flow wrapping around the Great Lakes low pressure looks to have little moisture for us.  

BUT...the caveat, especially with anything icy....it takes very little to send a car off a road.  I'll post more on tomorrow night tomorrow when the National Weather Service updates the forecast concerns.

Bob