Syracuse, N.Y. — A winter storm could drop heavy snow, ice, sleet and freezing rain on Upstate New York beginning Wednesday and lasting through Friday.
The storm could bring everything from difficult driving to potential flooding to power outages from icing of utility lines.
The National Weather Service office in Binghamton, which forecasts for Central New York, is calling this a “potential high impact” storm system.
The weather service’s Buffalo office has already issued a winter storm watch for all of Western New York and the counties along Lake Ontario. The watch, in effect from Wednesday night to Friday afternoon, says 9 inches of snow or more is possible in those regions.
Odds for rain and sleet increase to the south and east, although forecasters says it’s too early to know how the various pieces of the storm will set up and thus who gets what kind of precipitation. At this point it looks like snow in Western New York and the Adirondacks, with odds of rain and sleet highest in the Southern Tier and Capital District.
Melting snow over the next couple of days combined with rain from the storm could lead to flooding, the weather service said, although there’s no estimates yet of the odds of that or who might be hit hardest. There’s also a chance for thick ice on tree branches and utility lines, which could lead to power outages.
The storm, which Accuweather is dubbing the “Groundhog Day Storm,” will be the product of two separate systems making their way to Upstate New York. One system will be pushing cold air south from Canada and the Upper Great Lakes, while a second system. loaded with moisture, will be moving from the southwest.
It’s too early to know for sure how and when those two systems will meet, and thus who will get snow, rain or something in between. The weather service notes that the storm system that would sweep in from the southwest is just entering the Gulf of Alaska and won’t reach the continental U.S. until Wednesday morning. It will then move rapidly across the country, giving forecasters in the Northeast little time to study it. The forecasts could keep changing up to the last minute, the Buffalo weather service office cautions.
The storm is expected to bring ice and snow from central Texas to eastern Maine.
We’ll update this story as the storm picture becomes clearer, so keep checking our weather page.
Comments