Time To Worry: East Coast Ice, West Floods

UPDATE: Here is our new map. New York City has been removed from the ice, but Pittsburgh is now solidly in the ice zone.

ORIGINAL POST MONDAY NIGHT:

Residents in both the Northwest and the interior Northeast should worry about the weather for the next few days. I think both these areas could end up being big stories on the major news networks.

When I saw the amount of Ice (freezing rain) predicted here in State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map] rise over half an inch, which is more than enough to do serious tree and power line damage, I took at look at the map of our predicted ice amounts for the Northeast Tuesday and Wednesday - and it ain't pretty.

However, that's our internal forecast database - not our official forecast, which looks like this(NOTE: This was Monday Night, see above for our newest map).

Looking at the map above, I think we may have shown the snow over ice, perhaps causing a more benign portrayal than the reality. Whichever map you believe, when comparing to the the population Census population map, (as I always do!) there are a lot of major cities in the path of the ice:

- Pittsburgh & SW PA - Philadelphia & SE PA- Washington, DC & Baltimore (borderline)- Northern New Jersey- New York City & Southern CT- Boston (if you use the first map)

Of course, with ice storms, sometimes the density of the trees matters more than the population - last month's ice storm in northern Massachusetts perhaps the worst of both. So there's no telling how many people may lose power, but I think this could be a significant news story. This storm is certainly not moisture-starved like recent ones, as you can see on the current radar and in the precipitation forecast, which has a wide area of more than an inch of (liquid total) precip.

Speaking of heavy rain, it's going to happen in the Pacific Northwest. This total precip map would be scary enough but itself, but it's going to fall right on top of record snow cover, with plenty of warm temperatures to melt it.

Ken Clark (PREMIUM | PRO) has many more details - sounds like you'll be seeing the typical houses floating down rivers by mid-week.