Winter Storm Next Weekend Could Bring Big Impacts To Parts Of The Region

Jan 20, 2026

By Pam Knox

If you have travel plans or group events planned for late this week and next weekend, you should be paying careful attention to the weather forecasts this week. Even if you are not going anywhere, you should be prepared for the possibility of snow or ice cutting off power and clogging transportation corridors for a couple of days. You can already see the social media-rologists pumping out scary maps of big ice and snow storms occurring, especially on Saturday and Sunday. But even though it is far too early to get the details right, we do have a high confidence that impactful winter weather will occur in parts of the region.

The diagram below shows the general area for heavy snow and ice, but I am not showing specific model maps at this point because they are so likely to change over the next few days and they vary so much from one model to the next. Heavy snow is most likely to occur in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, while freezing rain is likely to occur south of that in a band that stretches all the way from Texas through northern MS and AL into northern GA and most of South Carolina. Note that while this is designated as the most likely place for snow and freezing rain to fall, the models are still quite varied.

Source : uga.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids