Cincinnati should get brunt of Saturday’s snow; Dayton could get hit

A storm appears ready to blast Cincinnati and Butler County.

After a week of hard-to-read forecasts because of the track of the storm, News Center 7 Chief Meteorologist Eric Elwell said the latest forecast shows a winter storm headed for Cincinnati, slated to begin before dawn.

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Butler County is under a winter weather advisory. Middletown, Hamilton and Oxford could see 2-4 inches of snow, Elwell said.

“The storm does look like it’s going to take more of a southern track, so that’s going to put the main accumulation, it looks like, from Indianapolis to Cincinnati,” Elwell said. “The southern Miami Valley is on the edge of where we think that snow might be, but it looks like it will stay south of Dayton.

“And if you go from Dayton northward, I think there’s going to be very little snow. There’s going to be a sharp cut-off,” Elwell said. “We do have to give some caution that even a 20-mile change north is going to make a big difference between whether Dayton sees one inch or four-plus inches of snow.”

“What made this storm more difficult was the fact of its original track coming across the Rocky Mountains,” Elwell said. “The way our forecast models are, they don’t do very well with terrain differences. And so when a storm comes up over the Rockies, we kind of have to wait for them to come out past the Rockies to get a good sample of the storm to put into the model data.”

The sharp cut-off, Elwell said, is due to the type of storm.

“It’s a clipper-type system,” Elwell said. “It’s not technically an Alberta clipper, because it’s not coming from Alberta, but it’s a clipper-type system. It’s just very compact, and it’s also moving with the jet stream, and the jet stream kind of focuses where the heaviest snow is going to be.”

The storm marks the second expected snowfall since spring began Tuesday.

Sunday is expected to be dry and clear with more sunshine and highs in the middle 40s.

Monday will start with sunshine but clouds will increase through the afternoon. It will be milder with highs reaching into the lower 50s.

The chance for rain returns Tuesday with highs in the middle 50s. Showers will be likely Wednesday with highs in the upper 50s.

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