Thanksgiving travel mess looms

(UPDATE:  I'll be doing a live online chat at 11 a.m. Wednesday at www.charlotteobserver.com.  We'll talk about Thanksgiving holiday weather and holiday travel.  If you want to shoot me some questions about the upcoming winter, I'll try to deal with those if we have the time.)

The storm system responsible for the weekend's icy conditions and hundreds of flight delays and cancellations in Texas is moving eastward and still threatening to make a mess of Thanksgiving travel plans.

The Charlotte area will avoid frozen precipitation from this storm, and the rain likely will end by Wednesday morning.  But this storm has the potential of fouling up flight schedules along the East Coast.  That, of course, has a ripple effect which would be felt in Charlotte.

And regardless of the storm's impact on flight schedules, it will make for nasty traveling conditions Wednesday for people headed north and even east from Charlotte.

Latest indications are that the storm's snow will be limited to inland areas, with the heaviest snow falling in a band from central New York up into Vermont and eastern Ontario and western Quebec. However, several inches of snow are likely in parts of West Virginia and in the western half of Pennsylvania.
Along the Interstate 95 corridor, it looks to be a rain event.  The rain could fall heavily at times late Tuesday and Wednesday, which will make for bad driving conditions up I-95 and I-81.

Added to all this will be gusty winds Wednesday.

The impact on air travel is still uncertain. If low visibilities and heavy rain develop Wednesday along the I-95 corridor from Richmond up to Boston, that will cause flight delays. Typically, as the delays build, the impact spreads to locations far from the storm's effects.  That is the potential problem Wednesday.

We'll keep close tabs on travel conditions Tuesday and Wednesday.

The good news is that conditions look to be a lot quieter at the end of the weekend, when Thanksgiving travelers are returning home.