VIA PHILLY.COM;
Several inches have already fallen today and roads are treacherous. The weekend before Christmas could be historically white with a coastal storm expected to drop 7 to 15 inches of snow.
Christmas 2009 may or may not be a white one, but the weekend before the holiday almost certainly is going to profoundly white. Maybe even historically white.
Yet another in a sequence of beach-ripping coastal storms is expected to leave 7 to 15 inches of snow across the region, with blizzard conditions possible near the Shore, where the storm’s effects might be the worst.
Unless the expertise of the entire meteorological community has suffered some kind of meltdown, the views outside windows all over the mid-Atlantic region today should resemble shredded coconut swirling in a Cuisinart. The snow should stop by midnight.
“This could wind up being a historic event,” said Louis Uccellini, one of the nation’s leading winter-storm experts and director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction outside Washington. The nation’s capital could be buried by two feet of frozen whiteness, significantly more than its average for an entire season.
In Philadelphia, where big December snows are unusual, it could be the heftiest snowfall in four winters and the biggest December snow since 2000.
Yesterday on both sides of the Delaware River, an armada of plows, scrapers, and trucks loaded with salt was poised to take on nature’s wintry invasion. Road crews were spraying brine solutions – a mixture of easily dissolvable solar salt and water – to lay a foundation for a long siege of salting and plowing.
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For a complete Philly weather update, visit Philly.com.
