Quantcast

Winter Storm Watch Issued for Long Island

snow
Accuweather.com
Accuweather.com

A winter storm is forecast to dump 4-to-8 inches of snow on Long Island late Wednesday night into Thursday, when the precipitation is expected change into rain before switching back to snow.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm watch for much of the tri-state area, including Nassau and Suffolk counties, from midnight Thursday to 6 a.m. Friday, which is Valentine’s Day.

“Snowfall will make travel treacherous on Thursday,” meteorologists in the agency’s Upton office said in a statement. “Heavy…wet snow may cause some weak…flat roof structures to collapse and trees will be susceptible to falling.”

Downed trees may bring down power lines and cause outages. There may reportedly be some minor coastal flooding as well due to astronomically higher than usual tides stemming from the full moon on Friday.

The flakes are forecast to start falling while temperatures are in the 20s on Wednesday night and will change to rain when temps go above freezing Thursday afternoon. Once the mercury drops back below freezing Thursday night into early Friday morning, the precipitation is expected to switch into snow again.

Northeast winds of 20-to-30 mph with gusts of up to 35 mph during the storm could reduce visibility to ¼ mile at times.

The chance of snow and rain lingers through Friday evening before partly sunny skies move in for the weekend, when temps will be in the 30s. The storm forecast is expected to change once it nears.