State gets chilly, with a bit of Panhandle snow
Mercury dipped as low as 44 degrees in West Palm Beach.
The “Welcome to Florida” sign in the northwest part of the state was covered in light snow as winter weather dipped into the Sunshine State.
It was part of a storm that hit the Deep South over the weekend and left thousands of people without power in the region.
In Florida, the news website northescambia.com posted a photograph of the sign that welcomes travelers to the state, covered with a sprinkle of snow.
In West Palm Beach, the temperature didn’t break 50 degrees until only as of 9 a.m. The mercury dipped as low as 44 degrees overnight and into the early morning. The highs at Palm Beach International Airport barely edged above 60 degrees in the early afternoon, and temperatures were expected to hit the 40s overnight Sunday on the coast and into the upper 30s near Lake Okeechobee.
Elsewhere in the normally warm state, flurries were reported in Destin and Miramar Beach, while temperatures in St. Petersburg were 48 degrees. Miami was a positively chilly 61 degrees Sunday afternoon.
“It does look like it’s going to get a little colder (Sunday night),” said Marc Austin, a forecaster from the National Weather Service in Ruskin, which is in the Tampa Bay area. It “will be the coldest night in Florida this week. Probably the coldest night it’s been since last winter.”
Austin added that the region’s cold is due to an arctic air mass followed brought a high-pressure system. The wind died down and that allowed for the normally mild South to cool.
Areas north of Tampa were expecting to get freezing temperatures Sunday night, even down in the 20s, he said.
Over the weekend, North Carolina had ice warnings; Georgia saw school and business closings; and on Friday, Jackson, Mississippi, had its highest snowfall since 1982.
Part of Asheville received 8 inches of snow on Friday and Saturday, making the storm the 15th-greatest since 1946, when the Weather Service started keeping records
ADVERTISEMENT of snowfall in the city.
Forecasters said temperatures for Sunday were not expected to be favorable for melting the snow in many parts of the south. Highs across much of North Carolina were not expected to get out of the 30s, and after a brief warm-up Sunday, a second round of cold air is likely to stall the melting.
Duke Energy was reporting almost 8,000 customers without power Sunday afternoon in the western counties of North Carolina and South Carolina.
The majority of those weree in Macon, Henderson and Buncombe counties in North Carolina, where restoration to 4,860 customers was expected by 11:45 p.m. Sunday.
In South Carolina, the highest number of outages was in Greenville, where 660 customers were without power.
The sign that welcomes travelers to the state was covered with a sprinkle of snow.