Here is the Mt Holly AFD from this morning:
KEY MESSAGE 3...There is an increasing potential for the area to be
affected by an impactful winter storm late Saturday through Sunday,
however quite a bit of uncertainty in the forecast details still
remains.
Signals in the upper level pattern by late week and the weekend
becomes quite active between the northern and southern stream jets.
The key elements embedded in these features are currently located
over the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean, so it`ll likely take at least
a couple more days for guidance to have a good handle on this
system. However, almost all available guidance depicts an area of
low pressure developing near Texas Friday before tracking eastward
along the Gulf coast into Saturday. Beyond Saturday there still
remains forecast uncertainty regarding the details of how this
system will play out for the east coast. However, at this time most
forecast guidance tracks the low north and east towards the North
Carolina coast and then off to the north and east from here by the
Sunday into Monday time frame. This track puts the mid Atlantic
region on the northern side of the system with the main question
then becoming just how close to us does the low track. There will be
a very strong and broad arctic high to our north and some of our
prior guidance had suggested this may be strong enough to
suppress the system just south of the area. But over the past
12 to 24 hours there`s been a general trend northward in
guidance suggesting the precipitation shield will make it into
our area. In fact, snow probabilities of the NBM now show a
60-70% chance of 2+ inches of snow and a 40-60% chance of 6+
inches of snow for areas roughly along and south of the I-95
corridor with decreasing probabilities farther north. These
probabilities are higher than with the prior forecast cycle. So
while this system still is about 5 days out, the signal for a
winter storm to impact at least parts of the area is higher than
usual. The timing of this would be as early as very late day
Saturday continuing through Sunday and potentially even
lingering into Monday depending on the system`s speed. We will
stress though that even with this trend in the guidance, most
east coast snowstorms typically drop their heaviest snows in
swaths 50 to 100 miles wide or less. And considering that the
pieces of energy that will drive this storm are still thousands
of miles away, that means it`s much too early to have much
confidence on how much snow will fall at any given location.
Users should keep a close eye on the forecast over the coming
days.