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| A frozen bridge in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina during the last ice storm they had, back in 2015. The normally temperate area is now under an ice storm warning, with icy roads and risk of tree and wire damage in the area. Photo by Jason Lee/The Sun News |
Lots of people flock to that region to play golf, or enjoy at least some relatively mild weather.
If you were planning something like that this weekend down there, you're out of luck
The area around Myrtle Beach and Wilmington, North Carolina is under a rare ice storm warning today into Saturday morning.
A shallow layer of cold air has slid down the East Coast all the way to the Carolinas. This is courtesy of the same Arctic high pressure that dropped temperatures into the teens and 20s below here in Vermont this morning.
A storm will form offshore of North Carolina and feed the needed moisture into coastal North and South Carolina to create freezing rain. Further inland a bit, there will be more in the way of sleet and snow, so not as much ice accumulation. There could be as much as a half foot of snow in northeastern North Carolina
But areas near and just inland from the coast could get up to 0.4 inches of ice accumulation from freezing rain. On top of the obvious trouble with travel, that's enough ice to drop quite a few branches, trees and power lines. So they're in for quite a weekend.
Hundreds of utility trucks and tree trimmers have already deployed to the region to deal with the expected mess
Although it will stay chilly in the Carolinas for the next several days, it will warm up enough to melt the ice Sunday and on into the new week.
The gathering pieces of this storm have already deposited a thin layer of ice on some surfaces in places like around New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, near the Gulf Coast. Not much has fallen, but it's enough to make the roads dangerous today.
The storm system causing this will head northeast and miss New England by a wide margin.
However, the orientation of the developing storm and the Arctic high pressure feeding into it is causing northeast winds along coastal New England. Usually northeast winds aren't THAT cold around Cape Cod, but this time the air is cold enough to produce some ocean effect snow.
Ocean effect snow is the same as lake effect, the kind that plasters Buffalo, New York from time to time.
Ocean effect snow on Cape Cod rarely amounts to anything, since cold waves there usually come with northwest winds. A northwest wind doesn't allow much time for cold air to pass over water near the coast, so little snow results.
This time, the northeast winds and stronger than normal levels of cold are allowing a few inches of snow to pile up on parts of Cape Cod.
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