CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Much of West Virginia experienced a wintry mix of precipitation on the morning commute Monday, but officials at the Charleston Weather Bureau said that was just a taste of what’s coming.
“The system coming mid-week looks a little more significant for parts of the region,” said Tony Edwards Meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Charleston.
How much more significant and what parts of the region however remain a difficult target to pin down for those trying to forecast the coming storm. According to Edwards it’s a classic nor’easter which will dump heavily east of the Appalachian Mountains and will deliver a punch of winter to the Washington D.C. metro area as well as extend up into the northeast and hit some of the nation’s major cities.
The impact will be felt in almost all of West Virginia starting with the morning commute on Wednesday morning, but the impact will vary depending on where you are. .
“Most everybody will start as snow, but warmer air will come in later in the day, and that will change a lot of it over to rain in the lower elevations west of the mountains, say Charleston up to Clarksburg,” he explained. “But the mountains will stay snow and potentially change over to a little bit of freezing rain in the southern mountains, but it should be mostly snow in the northern and central mountains and over in the eastern panhandle.”
Although hard to predict, Edwards suggested it was possible the West Virginia mountains and parts of the eastern panhandle could se as much as a foot of snow out of the system as it passed through during the day Wednesday.