Excellent AFD from Peachtree City, they do not agree with the Euro either?
LONG TERM...
(Friday morning through next Tuesday)
Issued at 302 PM EST Wed Jan 21 2026
Long term will begin with the winter storm expected over portions of
north Georgia. There is quite a lot to get into, so let''s begin with
the setup. The troughing pattern will begin to dive southward late
Friday into Saturday and continue into Sunday. The low off the
Pacific coast will then push eastward and be the main factor in our
impactful winter weather. The timing/track of this system is still
in question with the WPC reconnaissance flight expected to sample
the low this afternoon in hopes to get the data in by the 00z model
data. This will hopefully lead to more consensus with the models.
This has been a tough system to forecast, but we want to talk a bit
about the "northward shift" and why we look at ensembles. We have
been looking closely at the Euro model which has caused this
northward shift thinking. If you look at just the deterministic then
sure it shows a northward shift but if you dive deeper into the Euro
ensembles, this deterministic run is a bit of an outlier. This is
why we have not bought into the northward shift completely at this
time. We would like to see more consistency between model runs
especially with the sampled low pressure system before shifting our
thinking. When looking at the GEFS and ECMWF ENS, our confidence
still lies in the north Georgia with a wedge reinforcing this
Saturday into Sunday. The wedge will be a big determining factor into
how far south we see the wintry precip push. When looking deeper
into the wedge setup on the ensembles, then you can see that they are
both struggling to resolve the wedge as most long range models do
but ultimately are showing indications of a classic wedge setup
which also points towards reinforcing the freezing rain setup. It
will be interesting to see how the CAMs begin to come in tomorrow
and Friday to give us more of an idea as to where the corridor will
setup between freezing rain/wintry mix and cold rain. Due to this we
have decided to keep the area with higher likelihood of increased
ice amounts north of I-20 with the potential for seeing freezing
rain just north of Macon if the wedge is stronger.
We have issued a winter storm watch at this juncture for north
Georgia, north of the metro from 06z Saturday through 15z Monday.
This is not the ending point for this watch. We are still ~72 hours
out at this point so this is likely to change. We will be able to
refine the details as we get closer to the event. We want to focus
in on the importance of being prepared at this point and make sure
that you have preparations ready as soon as possible. If we receive
this prolonged period of freezing rain then we will see the threat
of power outages as well so please keep that in mind.
After the storm, we are expecting temperatures well below normal.
Once the freezing precip begins it is unlikely that we will reach
above freezing until Monday afternoon or Tuesday afternoon at the
earliest. This will result in any accumulations unlikely to melt.
This will also result in a long duration of time below 32 which will
increase the chances for busting pipes. Tuesday will be our coldest
morning with temps in the the single digits over much of the area
and wind chills near zero to below zero in northern Georgia.
