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Snow and ice continued to blanket roadways in Arkansas as a second wave of winter weather moved through the state Sunday, halting some of the road-clearing progress made on Saturday.
“We did lose a little bit of ground overnight,” Dave Parker, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Transportation, said in a text to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Sunday morning. “The second wave gave us another heavy amount of sleet and snow, almost ast much as the first round. So I think it is fair to say any progress we made yesterday has been slightly lost.”
Winter weather layers were still active on the IDriveArkansas map as of 7 a.m. Sunday.
“Overnight, the temps dropped and we received more sleet and freezing rain across the state,” a Facebook post from the Arkansas Department of Transportation said Sunday morning. “Please be careful and stay home if you can.”
Parker said the department’s teams still had good morale and were pushing forward to make good progress Sunday.
“We are not going to see much sunshine until Wednesday, and that will be very little, so melting will be slow,” he said. “We are using mostly super brine today.”
Super brine is a combination of salt brine and beet juice, Parker told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette earlier this week. Salt brine lowers the freezing temperature to about 25 degrees, whereas beet juice can help bring the freezing temperature even lower. He said that they can adjust the ratio of beet juice so the brine works in single digit temperatures.
“Our goal is to have a passable lane on the primary routes,” Parker said.
Accident numbers on state roads have been low, according to the Parker. Sunday morning there was an accident on Interstate 40 near West Memphis involving a tractor trailer, “but that’s been about it thus far,” Parker said.
Overnight accumulation
More snow, sleet and some freezing rain fell across most of the state overnight Saturday and early Sunday morning.
Colby Pope, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in North Little Rock, said that from midnight to 6 a.m. Sunday, an additional 1.8 inches of snow and sleet combination fell at the office. That brings the total amount of winter precipitation fallen at the office to 10.6 inches.
“During round two of the winter storm, a lot of places experienced mostly sleet with some snow also falling in parts of Northwestern Arkansas,” Pope said Sunday morning. Some areas in northwestern parts of the state saw an additional inch of snowfall.
For Central Arkansas, forecasters are mostly looking into sleet accumulation, which cut into snowfall totals, he said.
“We’d rather have sleet than freezing rain,” the forecaster said. “it does a number on the roads but it doesn’t stick to powerlines like freezing rain does.”
While the weather office had yet to receive reports about overnight snow and sleet totals from Central Arkansas as of 7 a.m. Sunday, Pope said it was likely residents in the area saw another inch or two overnight.
“There might be slightly higher accumulations in areas a little farther south and east because of a small burst of snow that fell Saturday evening that missed most of the Metro area,” he said.
Pope said they hadn’t received any reports yet Sunday morning from southern Arkansas but forecasts showed the area had mostly received freezing rain, with highest amounts from Saturday falling around a quarter of an inch.
As it gets closer to noon on Sunday, Central Arkansas is expected to see less than an inch more of sleet and snow accumulation.
“We will continue to see this second wave impacting Arkansas as more sleet falls. The winter precipitation is forecast to turn into snow briefly before the system moves out of the state, Pope said.
Pope said the system is forecast to end abruptly as it moves out of the state, especially in Central Arkansas, by early Sunday afternoon.
Temperatures are expected to remain below freezing, the forecaster said.
“We are only getting temperatures up into the middle teens by noon. We’re going to be lucky to get to 19 degrees, almost 20 degrees today,” he said.
Pope said the state might not see temperatures above freezing until Tuesday, and even then it might be only for a few hours.
Over 4,400 customers in Arkansas were without power, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks over 1.6 million customers in the state.
Over 2,000 of the reported outages are in Miller County and just over 1,000 outages were reported in Little River County as of 7 a.m. Sunday.
Pulaski County was only reported to have 88 outages as of Sunday morning.
