Southern Oregon will likely sidestep the brunt of a weekend storm that is expected to melt away Medford's heaviest snow in nearly a century, swelling streams and causing some localized flooding without causing the Rogue River to reach its banks.
The next storm front is expected to bring intense rain and high-elevation snows to northern California and pummel the Sierra Nevada Range, but it's likely Medford will see a mix of rain and freezing rain totaling about 1½ inches, according to the National Weather Service.
"We're definitely dodging, to some degree, a bullet here," meteorologist Ryan Sandler says. "This amount of snow is something you might see in a lifetime. Yet even though we have all this snow on the ground, it may not be so bad."
But right now, all bets are off for next week, when another "atmospheric river" of precipitation could bring a wallop to southern Oregon if the heart of the storm points this way, according to the Weather Service.
Read more at the Medford Mail Tribune.
