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.
If we could get a 1049 H over Wisconsin we'd be in business. A 1049 over Eastern Kansas sends everything to the south central GOM and puts Jacksonville in play.
Snow watch from Houston to Tallahassee with the highs dropping in. January 2018 redux when the creek here froze 6 inches thick with no snow on the ground at all and the deep south had 2 snow events.
Euro builds a big snowpack to our north and has some true arctic air over it but through 198 we are spared the brunt of it due to no snowpack.
At 204 we'd probably set record lows with snowpack on the ground. But it was showing those Temps for Monday a couple days ago. So color me skeptical when cold hangs around D7-8 on a model run.
Low is just north of Savannah with almost no precip associated with it. Cold front is undercutting the precip in middle Tennessee by early Tuesday morning. Freezing rain developing west. Fizzles moving east.