Saturday March 3 4:26 PM ET
Two Major Storms Converging on U.S. East Coast
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two major storm systems -- a wet one moving through the South and a frigid one coming down from Canada -- were on a collision course on Saturday, threatening to spawn a massive snowstorm in Northeastern and mid-Atlantic U.S. states the likes of which have not been seen since 1966.
The National Weather Service said heavy snowfall could begin on Sunday afternoon and evening, blanketing an area from Washington to southern Maine with at least a foot of snow, with some areas getting even more.
Major cities including Washington, Baltimore, New York and Boston, were ``under the gun for the potential for heavy snow,'' said Michael Eckert, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Eckert called the late-winter storm highly unusual in that it represented the combination of two mighty weather systems.
``It's very rare. We just don't see things like this happen very often,'' he said.
Local officials from Virginia to New England faced the task of preparing for the approaching storm, while people flocked to stores to buy food and supplies. The storm had the potential to wreak havoc for air travelers and motorists, with the possibility of businesses, schools and government offices being closed on Monday.
``Infancy Stage''
Eckert said the storm remained in its ``infancy stage'' on Saturday. He said an extremely wet system coming out of Mexico had been dumping torrential rains across Texas and the Gulf Coast
region. Some areas have received up to 5 inches of rain in the past day.
Authorities posted tornado watches from southeastern Mississippi all the way into the panhandle of Florida and southern parts of Alabama, as well as flash flood warnings across Louisiana, southern Mississippi and southern Alabama.
Georgia was also under a severe thunderstorm warning. A National Guard C-23 Sherpa aircraft crashed in bad weather on Saturday in a field near Unadilla, Georgia, killing all 21 people on board,
although it was not confirmed that weather conditions were a cause of the crash.
Eckert said ``a very, very deep cold-air dome'' had moved down through eastern Canada and the northeastern part of the United States and toward the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley.
``What's going to happen is they'll eventually merge into one main system,'' he said. ``You combine the extreme wetness of the system coming up from the South with the really deep, cold air of the North, and you've got the ingredients there for a major storm.''
The rain could begin to turn into snow toward evening on Sunday near Washington -- and perhaps as far south as Richmond, Virginia, Eckert said. The storm is then expected to track slowly
northeastward up into southern New England through Monday and into Tuesday, dumping heavy snow all the way to Portland, Maine, he added.
Cold Blast From Past
Experts said the brewing storm might not be the biggest blizzard in decades but could very well become the biggest of its kind -- a merger of two storms into a single massive one -- in 35 years.
``This one has similarities to the storm in late January of 1966,'' Eckert said. ``That one produced blizzard conditions over New England and New York, and there also was quite a bit of heavy snow down into the Washington area.''
That storm blanketed a large area with 2 to 3 feet (60-90 cm) of snow, with some locations east of Lake Ontario getting 6 feet (1.8 meters) of snow.
Eckert said the key to the magnitude of the storm would be where the rain began to turn into snow.
He noted that one of the computer-forecasting models foresaw mostly rain in the mid-Atlantic region, with snow falling farther west in the Appalachian Mountains and the upper Ohio Valley.
Eckert said communities had fair notice that a major storm could be on the way.
``Just be ready,'' he said. ``All you can do is be prepared for how this thing will evolve. Fortunately, we've got a lot of time. It's not like it's something that's jumping up at us from the middle of nowhere.''
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