ASHVILLE, Ohio (WSYX) — With the potential for winter weather moving into central Ohio this weekend, residents are starting to prepare for possible snow, ice, and cold conditions.

At Ace Hardware in Ashville, employees say they’ve already seen an uptick in customers looking to stock up on winter essentials. Shelves are filled with salt, snow shovels, heaters, and generators as shoppers plan ahead for any impacts the system could bring.

Store employee Gavin Edwards says demand typically increases as forecasts begin to show accumulating snow or hazardous travel conditions.

“When a storm comes to town, the demand is usually pretty high,” Edwards said. “People come in for salt and shovels, but it’s nothing we can’t handle.”

Some longtime residents say they’re already prepared. Roger Legg, who has lived in Ashville his entire life, stopped by the store but said he wasn’t concerned about the upcoming weather.

“I’m already prepared,” Legg said. “I’ve been through the blizzard in 1977 or ’78. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good snow, but I’m not scared.”

Emergency management officials across Ohio are urging residents not to be complacent. The Ohio Emergency Management Agency says it is closely monitoring forecast models and coordinating with National Weather Service offices as the system approaches.

Scioto County EMA Director Larry Mullins encourages people to prepare now, especially for the possibility of power outages.

“Make sure you have plenty of food — food you don’t have to heat up,” Mullins said. “Think about what you’d need if you’re without power or water for a few days.”

Store managers in Ashville say business was steady earlier in the week, but they expect heavier crowds heading into Thursday and Friday as more people prepare for the weekend weather.

Officials recommend checking emergency kits, limiting travel during hazardous conditions, and staying up to date with the latest forecast as details on the storm continue to come into focus.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Forecasters are increasingly confident that a major winter storm developing across the southern United States this weekend could bring accumulating snow to Northeast Ohio, as forecast trends continue to nudge the system’s track farther north.

While the most significant impacts from the storm are still expected well south of Ohio, the National Weather Service says confidence is growing that Northeast Ohio will be close enough to the northern edge to see snow late Saturday night through Sunday, with Arctic air ensuring any precipitation falls as snow.

Weekend storm chances trending upward

All eyes remain on the developing winter storm expected to take shape from Texas into the Southeast before lifting northeastward this weekend, according to the National Weather Service in Cleveland.

Forecast models have continued a gradual northward trend, increasing the potential for accumulating snow across Northeast Ohio, particularly east of Interstate 71. While snowfall amounts remain uncertain, forecasters say confidence is increasing that at least some measurable snow will reach the region.

Forecasters say the eventual impacts will depend on how a disturbance dropping south from Canada interacts with the storm system lifting out of the southern United States. If those features come together, higher snow totals would become more likely. If not, the system could weaken as it approaches the Ohio Valley.

Regardless of the final track, Arctic air already in place will keep all precipitation as snow across the region.

Quiet, calmer weather Thursday

Before the weekend system arrives, Northeast Ohio will get a brief break Thursday.

Lingering snow showers from Wednesday night will taper off early Thursday, followed by mostly cloudy skies and dry conditions for much of the day. High temperatures Thursday are expected to remain below freezing.

Thursday night will mark a turning point, however, as another cold front pushes through and ushers in a much colder air mass.

Dangerous cold settles in Friday and Saturday

Confidence is high that dangerously cold Arctic air will surge into Northeast Ohio late Thursday night and persist into early next week.

Temperatures are expected to fall sharply Friday, dropping through the day into the single digits. Wind chill values are forecast to plunge into the minus 10 to minus 20 degree range by Friday night, creating hazardous conditions.

Saturday is expected to remain bitterly cold, with highs struggling into the single digits to lower teens. With winds easing overnight and snow on the ground, temperatures could dip below zero by Saturday morning, even near the lakeshore.

Forecasters warn that the prolonged nature of the cold increases the risk of frozen pipes, dangerous travel conditions and cold-related health impacts.

Cold sets the table for snow to linger

The same Arctic air mass driving the dangerous cold will also play a key role in shaping impacts from the weekend storm.

With temperatures remaining well below freezing, any snow that falls late Saturday into Sunday would accumulate efficiently and be slow to melt, increasing the likelihood of lingering travel issues into early next week.

Forecast confidence is expected to continue to improve over the next couple of days as the storm system moves out of the Rockies and into the central United States.

Lauren Schott Recommends Celeste Ng, Joyce Carol Oates, Tiffany McDaniel, and More

Ohio has gotten a bad rap lately, and it hurts. I was born and raised in Akron and, even though I moved away twenty-five years ago, the place still feels like home and remains my go-to setting when writing fiction. My debut thriller Very Slowly All at Once takes place in the Cleveland suburb of Bratenahl, a small strip of land along the southern shore of Lake Erie.

I’d actually never even been to that part of Cleveland when I started work on the novel. I was trying to decide on a neighborhood for my upwardly mobile main characters, and Celeste Ng had already cornered the market on Shaker Heights. Bratenahl, I discovered, is a place of huge estates built by the Cleveland industrialists, two totally incongruous (and contentious) high rises from the 1960s, and even, at one point during the Cold War, a military base full of anti-aircraft missiles. It’s one of Cleveland’s wealthiest suburbs yet is surrounded on three sides by some of the city’s most socioeconomically deprived areas. Former residents included, to name but a few, Eliot Ness, a Kardashian, and actress Margaret Hamilton, also known as the Wicked Witch of the West. There was so much rich history to draw from, and so many scandals and struggles to remain independent from the rest of Cleveland, that I felt like I’d discovered a secret slice of my state that no one knew about.

But Ohio is like that: it surprises you. Shiny cities, rocky shores, muddy swamps, small towns founded by pioneers pushing westward… And then of course the wide, flat fields that are so many people’s only vision of the Buckeye state.

For me, Ohio is the place where so much of America swirls together: the prim stoicism of New Englanders, the bravado of New Yorkers, a helping of Southern charm, some good old Appalachian grit. It’s not always an easy mix and the landscape can be unforgiving, but, as so many of these novels show, even the darker side of life in Ohio offers up rich lives worth examining.

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Patrick Ryan, Buckeye

This family saga is set in the fictitious northwestern Ohio town of Bonhomie, founded in 1857 on land made fertile by a melting Canadian glacier. The place starts out as a neat grid, and as the novel unfolds over two wars and the relationships between the characters get messier, the town does too: sprawling suburban shopping centers pop up on the outskirts. Buckeye doesn’t shy away from what war does to ‘ordinary’ Americans, but there’s beauty and redemption in the heartbreak. The inclusion of Cedar Point, the Sandusky amusement park that featured in every one of my childhood summers, was a personal highlight.

Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

Three of McDaniel’s novels are set in the fictional town of Breathed, Ohio. In Betty, the namesake heroine’s roots stretch back to the Native Americans. By the time this novel begins, most of the Cherokee tribe have been forcibly removed to Oklahoma, but Betty’s father has stayed behind as part of those willing to describe themselves as “Black Dutch,” and marries her white mother. Theirs is an Ohio of racism, violence and tragedy but also infused with magic: inspired by her father’s stories and traditions, Betty, like McDaniel, becomes a writer forged in Appalachian foothills.

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

Shaker Heights, the suburban Cleveland setting for Ng’s novel about motherhood, race, and privilege, is the perfect location for a novel about middle class America. The real-life regulations on what color to paint your house, how short to cut your grass, and exactly where to put your garbage can on trash day make this suburb ripe for an outsider and her teenage daughter to come along and shake things up. Ng perfectly captures the strange otherness of the place; in reality, there’s no physical barrier between Shaker Heights and the neighborhoods that surround it, but when you cross into Shaker, you’ll know it immediately. The grass really is greener, at least for some.

Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible 

In Sittenfeld’s modern retelling of Pride & Prejudice, a sprawling Tudor in an upscale Cincinnati neighborhood stands in for Longbourne in Hertfordshire. Both places could seem a bit boring, until the Bennet sisters and their suitors show up. Like her Georgian counterpart, Liz Bennet in 2013 enjoys being out in the fresh air, and her long runs offer both an opportunity to encounter Mr Darcy (here a brain surgeon from San Francisco) and showcase the local sites, including the famed Skyline Chili. It’s not Georgian England and it’s not Manhattan, where Liz had been living until her father had a heart attack and she had to return to Cincy, but this country-club-centered version of Ohio still feels high society enough to carry the original novel’s preoccupations with class, marriage, and what everyone will think of you forward into our millennium.

Tracy Chevalier, On the Edge of the Orchard

I’d wager that most Ohio schoolchildren grew up learning songs about Johnny Appleseed, and this historical novel set in southern Ohio in 1838 features the man behind the legend, John Chapman, who sold his seeds and saplings to settlers like Chevalier’s Goodenough family. This is no Little House on the Prairie though; it’s a darker take on the American pioneer experience. Alcoholic Sadie wants to grow apples they can use to make cider, and her husband James is obsessed with growing perfect eaters, in between digging graves for his children that have succumbed to fever in the swampland they inhabit. It’s an inhospitable vision of Ohio, to say the least, and yet the Goodenough who eventually makes it out and heads west to Goldrush California can’t escape the pull of his Ohio roots, almost literally.

Joyce Carol Oates, A Book of American Martyrs

This harrowing novel about the murder of a doctor at an abortion clinic in small town Ohio, and that crime’s life-shattering effect on the two families involved, encapsulates the state’s ideological divide. But what Oates does here is to explore the repercussions of the conflict between the Evangelical killer and his victims by looking at the next generation. We feel as the daughters do: weighed down by the past but still trying to make something of it all. Ohio doesn’t come out looking great, but it’s a harrowing and thoughtful rendering of the battleground for a brutal struggle that remains at the heart of America.

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Very Slowly All At Once by Lauren Schott is available from Harper.