AccuWeather's Tony Laubach reported live from Texas as a mix of multiple kinds of wintry precipitation caused travel problems.
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00:00And I gotta tell you, probably within the last 30 minutes, I have seen all, well, not all four,
00:06but three main types of precipitation. I've seen the snow, I've seen the sleet, and I've seen
00:11rain, all within the same general area. We are in a very, the word of the day, and you're going to
00:17hear me use this a lot over the next several hours, sloppy, because that is exactly what this
00:22storm is. This is a very sloppy storm, and unfortunately for folks in the Denver Metro,
00:27or the Dallas Metroplex, Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, you are going to see a myriad of all
00:32these different types of precipitation, and I'll show you right here behind me. This is a mix of
00:37snow and sleet that is here on the ground, and then you kind of see some of the parking lot where
00:41I've come through. This is all just slush. This isn't even snow, and if I pick it up, it's basically
00:48going to turn to liquid, and my gloves are not that waterproof, so I'm not going to do that for
00:52you here, but thanks in part to what I would vaguely call the heating of the afternoon,
00:57we've seen a transition over from snow to this messy, sloppy precipitation, and it was some
01:03heavy snow. This was out of McKinney, Texas, earlier this morning, right about 10 o'clock or
01:08so, I would say, when some of the heaviest snow bands were rolling through here this morning. This
01:12is when temperatures generally were about a degree or two below freezing, so we were seeing entirely
01:18snow, mainly for the northern half of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and it was coming
01:23down hard and heavy. We've seen accumulations reported anywhere between three and six inches,
01:29depending on whereabouts you are. Again, this would be primarily north of I-20. As you get a
01:34little bit further to the south, it has been predominantly a sleet, maybe even some freezing
01:39rain mixed in at times, and then some rain as well. I have seen some of that rain in places here,
01:44like I said, that temperature right around freezing, so it's kind of hit or miss in terms
01:48of exactly what is coming down from the sky. The good news, though, again, though, is that snow
01:53has changed over a little bit, and we've seen it generally lighten up a lot, so crews on the roads
01:59have been doing a pretty good job of actually keeping up with some of this. While there have
02:02been a few accidents, a few spinoffs, we haven't seen anything major at this point. That is some
02:08of the good news. The bad news, as I've mentioned, the moisture content. There's a lot of water in
02:13this, and when it gets dark, unfortunately, the temperature falls, and a lot of water then becomes
02:18a lot of ice, so I would really assume that as we get later into the evening, probably after about
02:22four or five o'clock, and those temperatures start to drop back below freezing, we're going to start
02:27to see freezing conditions, and Dallas is notorious for a lot of elevated highways and interchanges
02:33all over the place, so I would imagine we're going to see an increase in some issues. However, though,
02:38it seems a lot of businesses, schools, that sort of thing have been closed or canceled for the day.
02:43This is about the lightest I've seen traffic, Anna, in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area in quite some
02:49time, so the good news is a lot of people not having to be out. We'll see what the evening rush
02:53hour holds here in a few hours, but expecting that snow and sleet and just this sloppy mess
02:58to continue into the evening into tomorrow morning as well. Hopefully, anyone there in
03:04Dallas that might be watching is home and planning to stay home for the rest of the day. Thanks for
03:08that update, Tony. Now, for an even closer look at the forecast, let's go over to Damian. All right,
03:14Anna, so earlier I referred to the forecast as a smorgasbord of winter weather. Tony called it
03:21sloppy, so do you have a word to describe the weather we're watching out for? I feel like I
03:26should stick with the S's. We have the alliteration going, but I need another adjective here. Okay,
03:32you got a couple minutes to think of something, but yeah, I mean, looking at this, I mean,
03:35Tony was talking about how it's just, yeah, it's sloppy there across parts of Dallas, and for me,
03:40once again, I'm calling this just a smorgasbord of winter weather because we have snow to the north,
03:46we have rain to the south, we even have some storms, some rumbles of thunder across the Gulf
03:50Coast earlier this afternoon, or I should say earlier this morning, but we're watching this
03:54narrow band there across the I-20 corridor right around the Dallas metro where we're seeing that
03:58transition from snow to sleet.