JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - It was very cold across Mississippi and forecasters say below freezing temperatures would continue through much of Friday.
The coldest pocket of air was in the Starkville-Columbus area where the temperature at 7 a.m. CST was 18 and the wind chill made it feel like 7, National Weather Service forecaster Mike Edmonston in Jackson said.
Edmonston said the temperatures across the central part of Mississippi could continue to fall Friday as a cold front moved east across the state.
In south Mississippi and along the coast, forecasters said some snow flurries with minor accumulations were possible Friday morning.
Mike Hill, a forecaster at the weather service office in Slidell, La., said snow could cover grassy areas by midmorning.
In many areas of the state, the temperature could reach the mid-40s, but the wind chill wasn’t expected to be above the 30s.
Warmer temperatures were expected going into the weekend.
“The reason for that is we have all these fronts line up, our winds shift to the south and that warms things up pretty quickly,” meteorologist Ken Graham said.
Highs are expected to stay in the 50s and 60s on Monday and Tuesday, but then another front will move in and cause another stark drop, leading to Tuesday’s highs in the mid-40s.
“There’s been several weeks of this, these fronts are a little more frequent than the fronts we’re normally accustomed to,” Graham said.
In the Natchez area in southwest Mississippi, National Weather Service meteorologist Steve Wilkinson said reports showed nearly half an inch of snow across the area Thursday evening.
“Some reported a little more, but we don’t believe it was more than an inch,” Wilkinson said. “There’s some really dry air pushing down that’s going to cut off the snow shortly.
“We don’t expect a whole lot of accumulation to continue.”
Wilkinson said cold and windy temperatures would continue Friday, but snow would not be likely.
“You’ll have some left over on the ground probably, but it won’t continue to fall,” Wilkinson said. “It will just be real cold and windy.”
Wilkinson said more cold temperatures, however, are likely to return next week.
“I don’t know if we’ll see snow or not, so we’ll just have to wait and see,” Wilkinson said. “With this roller coaster we’ve been on lately, you never know.”
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