Ice Is Nice--Winter Weather Advisory for Feb. 6/7

Greetings, all you flake followers. Tonight GSD is going to transition you to freezing rain followers, as The National Weather Service in Albany has announced a Winter Weather Advisory for the Berkshires and surrounding locations for a possibly moderate ice storm.

The Advisory is in effect from 5 PM tonight to 10 AM tomorrow, but we doubt we'll see precipitation linger that long into the morning.

While this advisory sounds good on its surface, it is only an advisory and the temperature may simply be too high to produce widespread icing. If we do see icing, it will be in higher elevation areas in the Berkshires.

Image courtesy of NWS Albany.

Even though the GSD Staff does not have a lot of confidence in this storm, we will still hold out hope for delays tomorrow morning. The Tuesday Pittsfield school system delay was an unexpected one, so anything is possible, especially if your school is above 1000 feet of elevation. The usual high-elevation towns have a significantly higher chance for delays tomorrow.

Predicting ice is much more of a crapshoot than predicting snow. The models are improving in their ability to forecast ice, but the temperature window for ice is so narrow that these ice forecasts often go wrong.

Still, driving could be dicey tonight (especially around midnight) and tomorrow morning. We will of course track those delays when/if they are called in.