CHARLOTTE, N.C. â Charlotte's chances of seeing wintry weather for the fourth straight week are all but gone, WCNC Charlotte Chief Meteorologist Brad Panovich said Thursday.
Earlier in the week, some computer forecast models were trying to bring a small chance of winter weather back to Charlotte. By Thursday, those scenarios were all but eliminated.
Even as a big winter storm stretched across the United States, the Carolinas were seeing rain and clouds Thursday. While a few rumbles of thunder were even possible across portions of North Carolina and South Carolina overnight through Friday morning, not much is anticipated in terms of winter weather outside the North Carolina mountains.
There's a less than 10% chance some portions of the Carolinas - mainly south and east of Charlotte - could see a very thin coating of ice early Sunday morning, impacts from isolated areas of winter weather were not expected in North Carolina or South Carolina.
With each passing day since earlier this week, the scenarios producing winter weather in the Carolinas became less and less likely.
"On Tuesday, we showed the chances and we had a pretty big area of 10-30%, which is pretty low," Panovich said. "That is shrunk even more, so you're generally seeing something in the 0-10% chance."
How computer models work
Panovich said he's tracking 81 different variations of the two primary models, the European and GFS. Those ensembles are useful in finding outliers and eliminating them from trends, and finding where models agree to identify likely outcomes.
"The mean for the European is showing no snow and the GFS is trending back to a trace," Panovich said. "So it's trending the way of the European and the other models, which show almost nothing."
Panovich explained that the first 25 ensemble numbers show mostly nothing with a couple of outliers with snow flurries and some snow near the Carolina coast.
"There's a lot more nothings in there," Panovich said. "That's kind of when you say, 'the mean, if I take all of those, the higher percentage of nothing is going to win out.' And it's not 50-50, it's maybe 75-25, maybe 80-20.
"So when you look at the totality of the information, which is what I do â I don't look at one single piece of data," Panovich explained. "Everything tells you this is not going to be a big deal."
February snow
January is better known for being climatologically colder than any other month on the calendar, but February gets recognition for being the snowiest by a hair.
Nearly one-third of all the snow we see in the Charlotte area falls in February. During this month, temperatures start to warm up more but this leads to more temperature swings that can set up favorable patterns for more frequent snows. The exact setup we are currently under will not break until the end of February.
January was the 24th-snowiest January on record in Charlotte with 4.3 inches of snowfall. The snow accumulated across three different events over a three-week span:
- January 16: 2.2"
- January 21: 1.9"
- January 29: 0.2"
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