Pedestrians cross the intersection of U and 13th streets NW during a snowy early morning on Jan. 17 in Washington. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
A dusting to an inch or so of snow fell across the D.C. metro area early Wednesday morning. Such amounts were in line with most but not all of our forecasts, which weren’t quite as steady and consistent as we would’ve liked.
The heaviest totals in the greater region focused around Baltimore, where as much as 1 to 2 inches came down.
The snow mostly fell between 4 and 7 a.m. as temperatures plunged from near-freezing into the low to mid-20s, which quickly iced up untreated roads.
At the airports, Reagan National reported 0.4 inches and Dulles 0.3 inches, while BWI was the big winner with 1.0 inches. Here are some other select snowfall totals from around the region:
Virginia
- Tysons-Mclean area: 0.7 inches
- Arlington: 0.5 inches
- Fairfax-Vienna area: 0.5 inches
- Dale City: 0.4 inches
- Herndon: 0.3 inches
- Mount Vernon: 02 inches
- Reston: 0.2 inches
The District
- National Arboretum: 0.7 inches
- Near downtown: 0.6 inches
- Near the Zoo: 0.5 inches
Maryland
- Baltimore City: 1-2 inches
- Columbia: 1.3 inches
- Severna Park: 1.0 inches
- Damascus: 0.7-1.0 inches
- Montgomery Village: 0.8 inches
- Gaithersburg: 0.5 inches
- Oxon Hill: 0.5 inches
- Greenbelt: 0.5 inches
- Poolesville: 0.1 inches
- La Plata: 0.1 inches
(Note that at the time of publication, it is still snowing lightly in our far southern and eastern areas, so totals are not final in those locations)
Forecast review
Aside from problematic opening and closing moments, the forecasts we issued for this event were pretty good. The snowfall forecast map we developed called for a dusting to 2 inches which generally matched what fell across the region. We also correctly captured the general timing and evolution of the snow.
But we wish we could take two things back in our coverage of this system, which began Friday. In our first outlook, we stated that this system had the most snow potential of the season so far. While we stand by that statement based on the weather pattern that was setting up, it may have sent too strong a message too soon, considering low confidence in the forecast specifics that far into the future. And of course, as it turned out, this snow did not turn into the season’s biggest.
Then, in our final update at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night before flakes began, I made the regrettable decision of suggesting the storm was looking like a bust and said to expect a just dusting or less — which was too low. The rationale was an emerging model consensus that portrayed a huge snow hole over the region. But the models were wrong and did a poor job capturing the snow that developed during the predawn hours as the upper level disturbance approached
I was not alone in reading too much into the late night model output; Doug Kammerer at NBC4, Mike Thomas at FOX 5 and Topper Shutt at WUSA all were similarly led astray. But it was the wrong call to basically pull the plug while the event was still unfolding. Upper-level disturbances are notorious for throwing curveballs and producing more snow than models predict. It would have been better just to leave the forecast alone late Tuesday night.
The fact that we started too high and ended too low leaves a bad taste in my mouth — even as the forecasting was steady and quite good in between. More than anything, our team strives to provide steady, reliable and credible outlooks. Recognizing that forecasting snow in Washington is always slippery, we’ll try to smooth out our forecasting for the next event the best we can.