After models all week consistently showed the D.C. area teetering near the edge of the big coastal storm this weekend, we can now confidently say that a big snow is almost certainly off the table. In fact, the balance of model data now suggests the storm will completely miss our region to the south and east, which is the direction we had been leaning.
There is still a small chance (about 20 to 30 percent) we could get fringed with a dusting to 1 inch of snow. Southern Maryland and especially the Maryland and Delaware beaches have a little higher chance of seeing up to an inch or two of snow, but even there it could end up a total miss.
While the snow probably misses the DMV, gusty winds generated by the storm — gusts near 25 to 50 mph — are likely to drop our wind chills into the single digits to near or a bit below zero for much of the period from Saturday evening through Monday morning.
Here’s where snow from this monster of a storm, which should rapidly intensify into what is known as a bomb cyclone, probably won’t miss: coastal areas from near Norfolk and Virginia Beach in southeast Virginia southward to near Wilmington in southeast North Carolina. That stretch is likely to get at least a few inches of snow late Saturday into early Sunday.
A bull’s eye of roughly 6 to 10 inches is possible, maybe up to about a foot, along the central North Carolina coast near the Outer Banks, where blizzard conditions are likely as wind gusts may top 60 mph. Big waves and coastal flooding are possible from the Mid-Atlantic to New England.
