A strong winter storm will bring heavy snow and rain to areas across the southern United States starting on Jan. 30, after a system knocked out power to hundreds of thousands just days earlier, national forecasters said.
“There is increasing confidence for significant heavy snow across much of the Southern Appalachians, Carolinas, and southern Mid-Atlantic Friday into Sunday,” the National Weather Service (NWS) said in a Jan. 29 post on its website.
Winter storm watches were in effect across areas of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia on Jan. 29, according to an NWS map. Notably, all of North Carolina’s counties were under a winter storm watch, and most of the northern section of South Carolina was under the advisory.
“The storm will produce snow and rain over parts of the Middle/Lower Mississippi Valley by Thursday evening, then move across the southern Ohio and Tennessee Valleys on Friday morning,” the agency stated in a bulletin.
The snowy weather on the evening of Jan. 30 and into Jan. 31 is expected to then move to the southern Mid-Atlantic states.
“This rapidly deepening storm system will produce powerful onshore winds along the Mid-Atlantic Coast from the North Carolina Outer Banks northward. Wind gusts near hurricane-force will coincide with astronomical high tides, producing moderate to locally significant coastal flooding,” the NWS stated.
“Near-blizzard conditions are expected across northeastern North Carolina and Southeastern Virginia, with sharply reduced visibilities due to snow and blowing snow, making travel extremely treacherous.”
Weather service forecasters said that arctic air moving into the Southeast will cause already frigid temperatures to plunge to the teens, in Fahrenheit, on the night of Jan. 31, including in Nashville.
Last weekend, power was knocked out for hundreds of thousands of people in Tennessee and Mississippi because of a storm that brought heavy snow and ice across much of the eastern part of the country.
Dozens of people have died in areas afflicted with bitter cold from Texas to New Jersey, officials have said.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said in a Jan. 28 post on X that 10 people died in the winter storm overall after reporting three additional deaths. On the same day, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear wrote in a post on X that Kentucky’s winter storm-related death toll rose to 11 after a man was found dead in the state’s Livingston County.
More than 300,000 U.S. homes and businesses were without electricity as of Jan. 28, according to the outage tracking website PowerOutage.us. A vast majority of the affected homes were in Mississippi and Tennessee; roughly 100,000 homes were without power in each state.
Forecasters say the subfreezing weather will persist in the eastern United States into February.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
