Source:  Corey Davis, NC CLIMATE OFFICE, 2/19/21


If the Piedmont of North Carolina is the ice storm capital of the south, then the ruling weather regime had a full docket over the past week, with two damaging storms since last Friday.

These high-impact events locally were part of a larger active weather pattern that has seen snow blanket nearly three-quarters of the continental US, extreme cold temperatures grip the Midwest, and almost unrelenting wet weather across the Southeast.

At the heart of that pattern was a fractured polar vortex that brought Arctic air unusually far south. In North Carolina, we were only on the fringes of that frigid air beneath the southward-sinking jet stream, which shuttled moisture-rich weather systems out of the Gulf of Mexico and across the state in quick succession.

Almost all of North Carolina has received at least 2 inches of precipitation over the past seven days, and more than five inches fell across parts of the southern Coastal Plain.

Temperatures near the surface have been mostly below normal, often hovering in the 30s with cloudy skies, while warmer air remained aloft associated with that surge of tropical moisture from the Gulf. However, across the northern Piedmont, the mercury made it just low enough that falling rain froze when reaching the ground.

It's an atmospheric setup that the region knows all too well, and the recipe for a damaging ice storm -- or in the case of the past week, a double dose of them.

February 12-13 Storm
Surface air temperatures were just below freezing from the Triad northward, and an offshore low pressure system brought steady precipitation throughout the day on Saturday, February 13, that fell as mostly freezing rain in those northern Piedmont counties.

Reports aggregated by the National Weather Service in Raleigh indicate a quarter-inch of ice accumulation in the Greensboro area and up to a third of an inch in Person County.

The weight of that ice on power lines and trees, moored in wet, weakened ground, caused numerous outages. By mid-afternoon on Saturday, electrical providers including Duke Energy reported almost 170,000 total outages, mainly concentrated in Forsyth, Guilford, Rockingham, and Stokes counties.

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