AccuWeather's Jon Porter urges people in the South to practice extreme caution if you have to travel, stay off the highways if you don't have to. A winter storm will bring snow, ice and extreme cold.
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00:00John, you talked about this a couple of days ago. Let's go back to the hurricane season.
00:05It was an unprecedented hurricane season across the Gulf Coast states, where we had five
00:12hurricane hits, beginning with Beryl in early July and then ending with Helene and Milton.
00:20And these are some of the same areas that got hit by hurricanes. We're now dealing with this,
00:26the snowstorm. Right, and a very unusual and rare snowstorm. And so yet again, more serious
00:33weather impacts across the Gulf Coast line here, places, communities that had lots of damage from
00:39all these storms. Milton, Helene, Debbie, Francine, Beryl, the list goes on and on.
00:44Now the same areas facing an unusual snow and ice storm. What a year it's been.
00:50All right, we've been talking about this for the last couple of days, John. Interstate 10
00:56is just going to be a mess. I mean, the message we've been telling people all day is to stay off
01:01Interstate 10. It's not where you want to be. And if you have flexible travel plans and you
01:05can adjust those plans, today is the time to do it, because we're concerned. Obviously,
01:09there have already been road closures along 10. There's extremely heavy snow occurring across
01:15parts of Louisiana, where that snow is falling one to two inches per hour. And in northern parts
01:21of the United States, that's too much for even the most experienced road crews to keep up with,
01:26never mind here across Louisiana, where there are few snow plows and salters and things of that
01:31nature. So we're concerned that there can be stretches of 100 or more miles of 10 closed here
01:38for several hours on end. A big problem here and major expansive delays and closures likely here
01:45as the problems continue to shift to the east. What's been so impressive, oftentimes with these
01:50storms, there's ice. There's been virtually no ice with this storm. The cold air is so deep
01:56across a large section of Texas and Louisiana. It is now snowing across the far southern parishes
02:03of Louisiana. There's been a little ice. Now, you and I last week was in the city of New Orleans,
02:10right? We were. Where it was cold, but it is just absolutely thumping snow from New Orleans
02:15toward Lafayette and toward Baton Rouge. John, we already have a report north of Lafayette of 10.2
02:22inches of snow on the ground. What a storm. This is going to be, as we've been talking about,
02:26it's such a rare, this will be a historic storm that people are going to remember for generations.
02:32Think about this in terms of living in New Orleans. You could live in New Orleans your
02:36entire life or Lake Charles or other parts of southern Louisiana and never see this amount
02:42of snow. So that's such an unusual event and it's all being driven by just how impressive
02:49this cold air is, this bitter cold feeding into the system with plenty of moisture from the Gulf.
02:54That's a recipe for big problems. And Bernie, you were mentioning, you and I were at the, along with
02:57other members of the AccuWeather team, at the American Meteorological Society conference last
03:01week in New Orleans. And one of the things we were talking about is the number of elevated
03:06roadways there. And that is just going to add more problems. Lots of elevated roadways along
03:11waterways here along the Gulf Coast. That's just adding more problems because those are going to
03:15be especially slippery. Snowing across the Florida panhandle this afternoon. City like Jacksonville,
03:20rain goes over to a period of snow. Tough forecast along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia,
03:26where it may be a lot of rain that goes over to freezing rain and sleet. Nonetheless, John,
03:32look at our snowfall map. There it is as we head into Wednesday morning.
03:37Heaviest totals along that I-10 corridor, especially in Louisiana. But we're going to be
03:40concerned with the risk for several inches of snow across the Florida panhandle, even places like
03:46Destin, Florida. And then, of course, as we talked about, as the storm turns up the coast here a bit,
03:51we are going to, the character of the storm changes a bit more. There can be some more
03:54sleet and freezing rain mixed in, but still think there are going to be
03:57significant accumulations for those areas. It's over in Houston. It's over in San Antonio.
04:03But the heavy snow continues to fall along Interstate 10 in Louisiana, where we're looking
04:08at over six inches of snow. AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter.
04:12John, thanks for joining us here on AccuWeather Ahead.