Winter storm with heavy snowfall headed for Central Virginia

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) -- A powerful winter storm is set to hit Central Virginia Wednesday into Thursday.

The timing of this is such that the snow will begin as early as 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Wednesday morning and pick up in intensity throughout the day and into Thursday morning. At this point, it looks like the snow will come to an end between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. Thursday morning and we should get some sunshine later in the day.

This system is currently located over the Pacific Northwest and will quickly drop through the Rockies today and into the Southern Plain States on Tuesday. From that point, it will move closer to the Gulf and pick up moisture, rapidly strengthening as it then crosses Georgia into South Carolina. It will strengthen even more off the coast of South Carolina and North Carolina. This is exactly what we call a "nor'easter."

Now, there are some factors that we need to consider as this storm develops some of those are:

• Exactly where the storm will track
• How much moisture will be over us
• How thick will the cold air be from the ground up into the sky

That last one is especially important because it allows us to determine what we use as the snowfall ratio. That is how much snow could potentially fall. Many of you have heard the term somewhere along the way of 10:1 and that means that for every 1 inch of rainfall, or what we call liquid equivalent, would produce 10 inches of snow. That's a good rule of thumb but it does not work in every situation. Sometimes we are a little bit warmer higher in the sky and therefore we get wetter, heavier snow, and that snowfall ratio might be 6:1 or 8:1, conversely, sometimes the air is super cold, and we get a lighter more fluffy snow and that could be a snowfall ratio of say 12:1 or 15:1. Well, this case looks to be very close to a 15:1 ratio which means that, if we were to get 1 inch of rainfall, or liquid-equivalent, we could potentially see 15 inches of snow. That is not the forecast, that is a tool we use to figure out the forecast.

Over the past 24 hours, our weather models have cut back on the amount of moisture that will be over Central Virginia. Earlier in the weekend, the weather models were putting out 1 to 1.5 inches of liquid equivalent and now that is lowered to between a 0.5 to 1 inch of liquid equivalent. That's because the models have trended a little farther south but that also makes the air colder so all these things kind of work in conjunction with each other.

Our forecast at the present time -- and it is subject to change based on how we see things changing with the different weather models over the next 24 to 36 hours -- is for 6 to 9 inches of snow in the areas from Ashland to Petersburg and from Farmville to the Eastern side of the Northern Neck.

Areas to the northwest of Ashland could see 3 to 6 inches of snow -- including Caroline County, sections of the Northern Neck west of Tappahannock, and farther west including Goochland, Louisa, Fluvanna and Buckingham counties.

The area that will be closest to the storm and have the most moisture will be along U.S. Highway 58 from South Hill to Emporia east into the Tidewater.  This area could see 9 to 12 inches of snow.

As mentioned earlier, this will be a lighter, fluffier snow so it will not have the weight of last week's system which should reduce the number of power outages that occur across Central Virginia from this storm.

We will continue to look at the different models and alert you to the changes in those models and subsequent forecasts.