20-30 inches of snow possible for Gaithersburg, Frederick, Leesburg and more as WUSA9 releases winter outlook

WUSA9’s weather team, led by legendary meteorologist Topper Shutt, has released its 2024-2025 winter outlook, which features the highest snow totals of any forecast we’ve looked at so far for this fall. We’ve already broken down the winter outlook from Meteorologist Mike Thomas and FOX 5 as well as the outlook from Doug Kammerer and the NBC 4 Storm Team, so let’s take a look at what Channel 9 has to say.

Of the three forecasts we’ve looked at so far, WUSA9 is projecting the highest amounts of snow, predicting 10-20 inches for DC and the immediate surrounding areas, and 20-30 inches for parts of Montgomery County such as Gaithersburg, Germantown, Clarksburg, and Damascus . Most of Loudoun County, all of Frederick County and part of Howard County are all in the 20 to 30 inch range.

WUSA9 notes that last winter may not have been particularly exciting in terms of snow, but it wasn’t the worst in terms of total snowfall either, as DC received 8 inches of snow and Dulles recorded 11.7 inches. The winter before (2022-2023) only 0.40 inches of snow fell in DC and Dulles, well below our usual expectations. In fact, only two other winters had less snowfall.

They attribute the lower totals in recent years to climate change and urbanization, our winters are getting warmer, but also note that DC, Dulles and BWI totaled over 128 inches (over 10.5 feet) in just one month in February. We had snow in 2010. This year we are in a weak La Niña pattern, which usually means a warmer than average winter

WUSA9 is using December 28th as the date of our first snow and has released some specific forecasts for areas like Rockville (19 inches), Fairfax (18 inches), Hagerstown (32 inches) and more. The full outlook with further details can be found here.