AFTER THE SNOW . . . RAIN IS ON THE WAY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 15, 1993                   TAG: 9303150068
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: CAROLYN CLICK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
AFTER THE SNOW . . . RAIN IS ON THE WAY
Roanoke Valley residents who survived the storm of the century now face the prospect of rain - and perhaps a bit more snow - by midweek.
"There is a storm coming out of the Northwest that is forecast to intensify and move up the coast," said Patrick J. Michaels, the state climatologist.
But Michaels said he doesn't expect it to pack enough of a punch to bring the region to another standstill. If there is rain, it isn't likely to generate flood conditions, he said.
A spokesman for the National Weather Service agreed.
"Right now, we are not looking at flooding problems," said Mark Cunningham, a meteorologist at the Roanoke Regional Airport. "The only good thing going is the moisture - there might not be much. This storm system took the moisture out of the Gulf of Mexico."
The wild card, he said, is if heavy rain falls on the accumulated snow. Then, he said, "we are going to have trouble."
But meteorologists aren't dealing much in wild cards these days as they revel in one of the most successful weather predictions in memory.
Regularly maligned when they get it wrong and taken for granted when their predictions are on target, meteorologists suddenly are finding themselves the heroes of the hour.
Their early alert gave everyone a head start in storm preparations. By Friday night, municipal officials throughout the region had readied emergency preparedness plans, highway officials had plotted snow removal routes, and nearly everyone had made a final run to the grocery store for weekend provisions.
Michaels, a University of Virginia professor, said it hasn't always been that way.
When a storm comparable to this weekend's blast swept through Virginia in February 1983, residents dismissed the warnings of weather forecasters because a similar storm had been forecast several days earlier.
"That was another very good forecast," he said. Unfortunately, he added, `It followed on the heels of a whopper that never materialized."
After the fanfare over this storm dissipates, Michaels said, it will end up in the record books alongside that 1983 storm and the even bigger Ash Wednesday storm of 1962.
"Was this the storm of the century?" Michaels said. "It obviously set some snow records within a 24-hour period."
But, he added, "I don't think it was . . . as destructive as the March Ash Wednesday storm in 1962."
Both the Ash Wednesday storm and the February 1983 storm dropped more snow on Virginia, Michaels said.
But Michaels said there was no question, in terms of barometric pressure - what he calls the "physical measure of the power of the storm" - that this was the granddaddy of them all.
"It was a century-class storm for barometric pressure," Michaels said. "If this storm had been slower, I don't think we'd be talking. We wouldn't have any phone lines."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB