You Want a Ton of Ice With That?

Not too long ago I mentioned an AccuWeather forecast for my area for an ice storm in the middle of January - some time  around or during the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend - but the forecasting service backed off its prediction for awhile.  Now, with less than two weeks before the King holiday, AccuWeather is back to forecasting an ice storm for the New York area, saying that on Saturday,  January 16, we could get up to an inch and a half or more - or more - of freezing rain.

Did I happen to mention it would fall over an eight-hour period after dark - literally an inch and a half of ice overnight?

By the morning of Sunday, January 17, my neighborhood - indeed, the entire Tri-State New York City area - could look something like this. And if the wires still hold up, we'll be lucky, to say the least. 

I know that the King holiday is, as I type, still a long enough way off for the forecast to change later on.  But this forecast still scares me, as it could still pan out.  For all the jokes AccuWeather inspires, the folks there don't make such a forecast lightly.  If they think there could be an historic ice storm twelve days from today, they're going to come out and say it.

An inch and a half of ice wouldn't be a disaster.  It would be worse.  A massive blackout could hit and persist for weeks.  Everyone would be immobilized for days.  Few people would be able to keep warm - and the trend is for colder weather in the Northeast throughout January.  

Right now, though, AccuWeather is alone in forecasting an ice storm for the King holiday in the New York area.  Other weather services with fourteen-day forecasts, including The Weather Channel, have snow or clouds for the King holiday weekend at best, and the latest Global Forecasting System model for the East Coast does have a storm for King Day itself - but a snowstorm, with this map showing possible conditions at 1:00 PM Eastern Standard Time that day, January 18.

And the National Weather Service - which, unlike AccuWeather, isn't forecasting the weather for profit and so is much less likely to unnecessarily scare anyone - actually sees below-normal precipitation for the East in the week leading up to the King holiday (though that doesn't rule out precipitation entirely, and it will still be cold).  

That all said, I'm still worried.  If an ice storm literally did hit where I live, it wouldn't be the first time a weather forecasting service made a unique call for a natural disaster that turned out to be correct and that everyone else caught up to later.  It would just be the first time that weather forecasting service was AccuWeather.

I'm going to be antsy for the next two weeks.  In the meantime, it looks less likely that it will snow next Tuesday, so I can take my car in for repairs all right.  So  I can stop worrying about a snowstorm early next week . . . and start worrying about an ice storm late next week!

Looking forward to spring yet?