Days after a major winter storm caused paralyzing snow and ice for a large part of the U.S., another round of Arctic air was moving across the country and forecast to bring another storm to parts of the Southeast.
The low pressure system that was forming in the Southern Plains Thursday was moving east, and "expected to produce a major winter storm" for the Mid-Atlantic states and the Carolinas and Virginia, the National Weather Service said.
In the Charleston, South Carolina, area, wind chills will likely be in the single digits Sunday morning, the weather service forecast office there said.
Snow was forecast for an area that includes Charleston as well as Statesboro and Savannah in Georgia starting Saturday and through Sunday morning, with total amounts of between 1 to 4 inches, it said.
In an area of central North Carolina, including Raleigh, Fayetteville and Winston-Salem, the forecast was between 5 to 8 inches of snow from Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon.
But where the heaviest snow will fall is "highly uncertain," the weather service there said.
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"There's going to be places that get more snow maybe than what we have forecast, and there will be places that get far less," National Weather Service meteorologist Nick Petro said in a video briefing Thursday.
North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein issued a new emergency declaration in advance of this storm, in addition to one issued for the last one, and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster extended his declaration through the weekend.
"It looks like it's going to be snow, not ice, this time," Stein said Thursday in a visit to a brine facility, in which he thanked road workers. "That's a good thing, but it's still going to have real impacts on our lives."
Along the coast in Virginia, there could be blizzard conditions Saturday night into Sunday, with "near zero visibility" and wind gusts of 50 mph, the weather service said.
Richmond could see 3½ inches of snow, and Norfolk could get more than 9 inches through Sunday morning, the agency said.
Blizzard conditions are also possible along parts of the North Carolina coast, the weather service said.
Those conditions could happen because the storm is expected to bring a strong onshore flow of wind from the ocean toward land, and when that happens during snowfall it can create dangerously low visibility, the weather service said.
