There's nothing better than snow followed by Arctic air. Throw back to my childhood there. We used to stay cold and snowy for days on end. I remember one 2 week period in January in the late 70s where it snowed at least some every day or two.
Ratios will be your enemy this weekend most likely. It's looking like about 8:1 along the Plateau at hr 60 but it drops quickly down to 3:1or 4:1 over Knoxville and valley area. That's sleet ratios.
I was looking at notable Mid Tenn weather and found quite a few -15 or below all time records in February. Some of those places may have been colder in 1985 but lost reporting stations. Even more record breaking winter events in the mid-state happened in February.
I'll make this note as we all hope for the best. Models have performed poorly with northern stream events this year with too much snow, and have underperformed on southern stream events as a rule. So we can hopefully count on that again.
Models struggle with how far eastward cold makes it in setups like the GFS is snowing. I'd probably shift the sleet and zr areas southeastward by a good bit.
It's tried a deep south bomb two runs in a row. Always in that mythical d8-10 range with huge snow storms. But a smaller version of that happened in January 2018.
The snow cover factor will play a big role. February has a lot of all time record lows in the midstate. Very impressive since Jan 1985 owns most of those in the state. I've been -20 in February before and that was in the oft mentioned 1996. Managed around -14 in late February 2015.
I've had at least some snow on the ground all but maybe 10-14 days since Christmas. It's been on the ground since Saturday now and will at least make it through part of tomorrow.