Chance of Sunday snow remains for Charlotte, but with ‘a lot of uncertainty’

As of Friday afternoon, the Charlotte region has a 50% chance of a wintry mix of snow and rain early Sunday, but even the National Weather Service isn’t sure of what to expect.

“There has been a lot of talk about the potential of snow .... in particular the Greenville-Spartanburg area and Charlotte area,” the NWS wrote in a Jan. 16 Facebook post.

“A lot of uncertainty still exists with the potential for accumulating snow across the area, but this is definitely the best chance of the winter so far for many locations outside the mountains.”

The chance bounced from 30% to 50% Friday afternoon, with forecasters predicting a rain-snow mix might start around 4 a.m. Sunday and continue until 1 p.m. At that point, it will switch over to just rain, experts suspect.

The snow “window” will be brief, ”as temperatures are hovering near freezing along and east of Interstate 85,” forecasters say. “This window looks to quickly narrow” due to winds keeping temperatures too warm to support snow, the NWS said.

The high Sunday is expected to be 42 degrees and the low will be 23.

“So what’s driving the low-end snow chances? There’s an upper-level wave of energy swinging across the Deep South that will help to initiate precipitation across the area Saturday night into Sunday. And there’s another arctic front arriving from the west at the same time,” the NWS said Friday.

“The forecast comes down to timing of these two different moving pieces. If precipitation can spread far enough west and if the cold arctic air can arrive quick enough, there could be a window for a brief period of light accumulating snow (generally less than 1 inch) mainly south of I-85 Sunday morning. If the precipitation remains too far to the east or if the cold air is too slow to arrive than we won’t see any snow at all.”

The forecast for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday Monday is clear skies, with a high of 48 degrees and a low of 20 degrees, forecasters say.

This story was originally published January 16, 2026 at 11:37 AM.