The Daily Citizen, Dalton, GA

Local News

Discussion

Welcome to our online comments feature. To join the discussion, you must first register with Disqus and verify your email address. Once you do, your comments will post automatically. We welcome your thoughts and your opinions, including unpopular ones. We ask only that you keep the conversation civil and clean. We reserve the right to remove comments that are obscene, racist or abusive and statements that are false or unverifiable. Repeat offenders will be blocked. You may flag objectionable comments for review by a moderator.
comments powered by Disqus
February 13, 2012

Wintry mix on the way?

By Mark Millican markmillican@daltoncitizen.com

Northwest Georgia finally pulled in some sub-freezing temperatures over the last few days, and now the region has some frozen precipitation to look forward to.

Well, a little.

Professional weather watchers said Monday afternoon that the area could see a “wintry mix” of freezing rain, sleet or snow beginning Monday night and stretching into Tuesday morning for a few hours.

“We’re not expecting a whole lot,” said Claude Craig, director of Whitfield Emergency Services. “I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of accumulation of snow. I think if we see anything it’ll be some freezing drizzle type precipitation. Our main concern is with the timing of it — it looks like it could come in anywhere between late tonight and late morning tomorrow. It just depends on the temperature of the ground as to what it will do.”

He said overnight lows Monday and into Tuesday were predicted around 32 or 33 degrees.

“My main concern is the ‘drive time’ issue in the morning,” Craig said. “We’ll be out early in the morning monitoring the situation and see what all’s going on, and we’ll take action from there.”

He added coordination between county and city crews, and the school systems, were already taking place Monday afternoon.

Alex Sosnowski of Accuweather said the agency is “not expecting a great deal of wintry mix with this thing coming in tonight, just a little bit, and that can coat some grassy surfaces, car tops, that sort of thing.”

He echoed that he didn’t expect accumulation on roadways.

“Motorists who are going to be out during the nighttime hours will want to take a little care driving around, going over a bridge or something like that,” he said. “Conceivably, that could be a little slippery as well as elevated spots ... the storm that’s coming in is essentially taking out the cold air in the East and if this was any other winter we’d have a situation where the cold air is going to fight on and we’d have several inches of wintry mix, but that’s not the case this time — the cold air is picking up and leaving as the storm’s coming in.”

Chip Chapman of WDEF-TV Channel 12 in Chattanooga posted on the station’s website (www.wdef.com) that the wintry mix would be changing to rain Tuesday morning with a high in the mid-40s by the afternoon. His extended forecast calls for more rain by Thursday with a high near 60.

Text Only
Local News