Phone apps may show many inches of snow. Are those Triangle forecasts true?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Phone weather apps can be inaccurate if meteorologists aren’t interpreting data.
- Local meteorologists use multiple models and experience to make forecasts.
- Ice accumulation from the upcoming storm is expected to have bigger impacts than snow.
Check the Apple Weather app, and you might see 6 inches of snow in Raleigh’s forecast for Sunday, Jan. 25.
But tune into a local news station, check with the National Weather Service office or read the latest updates from The News & Observer, and you’ll find a vastly different prediction.
Phone apps and social media can be hotbeds for inaccurate information about weather forecasts, said Don “Big Weather” Schwenneker, a meteorologist at ABC11, The News & Observer’s newsgathering partner.
They share data directly from a model, and “one model is not a forecast,” Schwenneker said.
“It all depends on what model at what moment that phone looks at,” he said. “But the one thing those models and computers are missing is human intuition.”
Meteorologists know what has happened in the past; they have experience that models don’t. And when they build forecasts, they consider many models.
“We’ve seen this play out many times,” James Danco, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Raleigh, told The N&O in a phone call. “This is not the setup for a snow storm here.”
How much snow and ice will we actually get?
ABC11’s forecast calls for 1 inch to 3 inches of snow and sleet at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Ice accumulations of 0.25 inches to a half-inch are expected from freezing rain.
“Sleet is actually better for us, because you can shovel sleet, and it doesn’t stick as much to wires, trees, things like that,” Schwenneker said. “Freezing rain is really what I’m worried about.”
Forecasters at the National Weather Service in Raleigh provided snow and ice accumulation forecasts Thursday.
For the weekend storm, meteorologists are expecting about 1 inch of snow and sleet accumulation in the Raleigh area, Danco said. Between 0.25 inches and 0.5 inches of ice accumulation is expected on tree limbs and power lines — enough to cause outages.
