SAN ANTONIO – Martin Luther King Jr. Day will see mostly cloudy skies, occasional drizzle and temperatures in the 50s and 60s. By nighttime, the Alamo City’s weather begins a dramatic change.
For this reason, a Winter Storm Warning goes into effect from midnight Monday night to 6 p.m. Tuesday in anticipation of icy conditions on Tuesday.
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Tuesday’s Winter Weather
Temperatures will be near 50 degrees across the San Antonio area near midnight on Monday. A cold front will move through during the predawn hours on Tuesday bringing in very cold air.
Temperatures will plummet to the freezing mark for locations along and north of I-10 and Highway 90 by sunrise.
Some scattered rain showers happen overnight Monday into Tuesday, however, as the colder air moves in with the cold front, the rain will begin changing over to freezing rain and sleet.
As a reminder, freezing rain looks like regular rain falling, but it freezes onto whatever it touches. Sleet, on the other hand, falls as small pellets of ice that bounce off of whatever they hit.
The rain-to-freezing rain changeover will occur from north to south. Travel on bridges, overpasses and potentially even surface roads will become hazardous as soon as the rain changes over to freezing rain and sleet.
The Hill Country will be the first to see this change occur, likely between midnight and 6 a.m.
San Antonio will be next in line. Current indications suggest that the metro area should see a change from rain to freezing rain and sleet near sunrise give or take a couple of hours.
For points south of the metro area, the change from rain to freezing rain is expected to occur after sunrise.
Throughout the day, scattered showers of freezing rain and sleet will continue to move through the area. This is expected to lead to light accumulations that will create travel impacts.
There is a degree of uncertainty as to the extent of the impacts, and this extent will be heavily dependent upon if and where moderate to heavy bands of ice occur. This will make the difference between a light glaze and a thick coating.
For the Hill Country, there is a chance that some snow could mix in with of the precipitation. However, this still will not produce the scenes that we saw back in December, but rather a slushy, icy, dangerous mix of accumulation on the ground.
While everyone would like to know if schools delay or cancel classes, the school districts typically do not make that decision this far in advance of a weather event. However, KSAT will have the latest closure information as soon as it becomes available.
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